Last week I wanted to brainstorm with a colleague, on a new piece of source code, but we were not in the same physical location. So I did a quick google for some form of collaborative real-time text editor. However, from the applications I found, nothing quite fitted all of my needs.

• small download
• really simple to get up and running
• works over our firewall
• cross platform
• free

So with all this in mind, I set about creating a tiny app that addressed my requirements.

I called it netpad, and it is a very basic text editor, that uses http to synchronise between remote instances of itself. (Netpad is both an http client and http server)

It's still very pre-alpha, but I'd thought I'd share now, to get useful comments. I'm just working on the algorithms for conflict resolution at the moment. I think my main focus is towards the real-time edit protocol, rather than the editing vehicle.

basic instructions

• Fire up netpad with a friend

Launch Netpad with Java Web Start
or Download JAR file [37k]
• One of you needs to go to the menu - Net / Connect to Server
• Enter the address of the other netpad instance, e.g. joe-pc.example.com
• you should both receive each others edits, on a exponential decay polling basis.