Monday, April 22, 2013

Fargo - here I come

I'm a fan / reader of Dave Winer, and I like outlining.  Therefore, I wanted to give fargo a try.

Here are my notes on my first impressions.  By the way, I am using Chrome browser on a Macbook Air.

Connect to dropbox
First, I had to allow fargo to use my dropbox account.  After I gave permission, it looks like a new folder was created in my dropbox folder -- Dropbox/Apps/Fargo.  If you create a post, it is saved in this folder as an opml document.  After I made some changes with fargo, I see that the file in my dropbox folder on my local machine has updated.  That was simple and easy.

Offline access
As a test, I turned off my internet connection.  The fargo application in my browser gave me this
error:
Dropbox save error
Can't save to Dropbox because a network error occurred.
I ignored the error and made some edits to the document in the browser.  As expected, the changes did not appear on my local version of the file.  After turning my internet on again, fargo uploaded the changes to dropbox and updated the local version of the file.

I'm not sure how I am supposed to edit a fargo document when I am offline.  I edited the text with a text editor, and that works as expected.  But it would be nice if I knew how to use the browser application to make updates to the local version of my file.

Using fargo
You can begin using fargo right out of the box, but I think it will take me a little bit of time before using it will be second nature.  Here are some initial observations about the usability:
  • There are two modes.  Structure mode and text mode.  This reminds me of the vi text editor which has the command and input mode.  It would be cool if when I am in structure mode, I could navigate with the standard vi shortcuts.  For example, I could press w to go to the next word, 0 to go to the start of the line and so forth.  
  • Out of habit, I keep pressing <command> s, to save the document.  This causes the browser to prompt to save the document, which is not what I want at all.  It would be nice if that shortcut could trigger a sync with dropbox, but I'll probably just have to get out of the habit of pressing <command> s. 
  • Pressing enter causes the outliner to make a new item in the outline.  This makes sense if I am at the end of the line.  However, if I'm in the middle of the line, I'd rather want a new item in the outline that used the text from the middle of the line to the end of the line that I was on.  
  • There's a cribsheet which gives some shortcuts.  Press command + shift + ?.  It would be cool if I could leave the cribsheet open at the bottom of the page.  Also, it would be cool if I can add some more keyboard shortcuts.
Overall impression
I think it's a pretty cool app that I plan on using more and more. 

No comments:

Post a Comment