(Perhaps more accurately, “Why Scatterand Exists”)
I like the idea of web application, but I rarely find one that I actually like. Or at least I rarely find one that I like as well as the desktop equivalent. Web applications have their advantages, of course — effortless synchronization, easy collaboration, availability on any computer with an internet connection. But when I am on my own computer, and I’m not trying to synchronize with other people, web apps just feel cheap and underpowered.
The problem with the world is that I have to choose between being able to work with documents over the web, and having a decent, full-featured editing interface on my desktop. The Scatterand project exists to fix that problem. Scatterand aims to be a web word processor and document editor that is also the best word processor on your desktop.
What makes Scatterand better? Here are two guiding principles:
- The server belongs to you. The server-side scripts for Scatterand are open source, pure Python, and able to run in the background on your own machine, or on any web server that supports WSGI. That means that you control the feature set, and you control your data. (Of course, you can still use Scatterand to set up a hosted service if you want to…)
- The client belongs to the document. Most web applications try to cram their entire user interface into the browser’s content frame. With Scatterand, the page you get from the server is your document (it just happens to be editable). On the desktop, a dedicated, webkit-based browser provides a native interface to the JavaScript based editing tools. In the browser, Scatterand uses context menus and dialogs to make the editing controls as un-obtrusive as possible.
Scatterand is not finished or feature-complete, but it’s already useable as a simple rich text editor in a test environment. You can check out the source code from the repository, or download ready-to-test Debian packages from the Scatterand PPA on Launchpad.