Tiny Little Office

381 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by donohoe

56 Comments

oijkuij

8 hours ago

If folks like this kind of thing, I discovered https://bento.page/ from a HN post and have been using it off and on for the past few months. It has a much larger featureset but is specifically focused on presentations (for now!). Unlike this project, the editor and content embed themselves in an html file, so you aren't dependent on the host site existing to serve the editor.

monk_grilla

7 hours ago

> https://bento.page/

Maybe I'm a 2026 luddite but I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design. At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.

I am gradually becoming resigned to the fact that I'll have to get over this prejudice, though I'm not sure how I will.

NewsaHackO

6 hours ago

I agree with you, but it is so funny that three years ago, a website that look like this would probably make the front page for its excellent design alone. Now, it gives off similar energy to a wix website.

earthnail

an hour ago

Landing pages are always a proxy for quality. Quality in implementation, quality in domain knowledge, in communication…

At a time when building such a page was hard, it communicated quality in implementation. Now it fakes that, and that is deceptive and therefore met with negative reviews reaction.

I find it completely logical.

thih9

3 hours ago

You are right, then again: I think three years ago someone would have commented about the gloss in the background as well (saying that it’s unhelpful, distracting and resource intensive).

mtford

an hour ago

That and the "The boring deck is dead. One file killed it."

It makes me kinda tense up - I've become almost allergic to it. Kinda interesting really.

JMiao

4 hours ago

it's a fair criticism though. learning and eventually relying on new tools is an investment. it helps to know the developer is invested too, not just moonlighting.

altmanaltman

3 hours ago

Not only the design but the text. Like it says so much and so little at the same time and constantly repeats the same cliches like "the file is the app" or "the api is the x". Unmemorable, unfocused and boring is what it comes across. I know devs don't care about marketing copy but it does make a difference on how you're presenting your app to first time potential users.

mdrzn

an hour ago

same, i've been using it extensively and it's very convenient having the ability to let Codex/ClaudeCode generate a whole deck, and then do the last edits myself in the browser.

mikepurvis

4 hours ago

I'm intrigued about the "Trip Planner" being a top-level app. Only tried it in a very surface level way, but the recent trips I've planned (Ottawa for 6 people, Cancun for ~20) have ended up as an ugly mishmash of spreadsheets + google maps saved locations list + random chatgpt sessions.

It feels like there's an unmet need there for managing something more flexible than a minute by minute itinerary, maybe like a list of must-do and want-do activities and dining options, with the system able to figure out what is open when and has other constraints like the weather, costs, what activities pair well together, which group members some things are more or less suited to, what the contact details are for things like a private tour, etc etc.

simonw

10 hours ago

Tell Claude or whatever to read https://tinylittleoffice.com/llms.txt and it will then be able to generate URLs that render documents.

Here's a deck I had it generate about how the URL format works: https://bit.ly/4yRBc1v

monk_grilla

7 hours ago

Why not just get your agent to write LaTeX? Use the beamer template and get a much more professional, customisable, git-commitable and transferable presentation.

gf000

29 minutes ago

Then why not typst? Much faster to render and far more ergonomic/human-understandable when you eventually have to touch something inside.

simonw

6 hours ago

You inspired me to knock together a LaTeX version of the same pattern - lets you drop LaTeX in the URL so you can link to the rendered version.

https://tools.simonwillison.net/latex

what

3 hours ago

> you inspired me to prompt an agent to slop something together

Who cares?

groestl

30 minutes ago

Or typst, did that with my CV.

yellowapple

8 hours ago

FYI: OpenStreetMap seems to be blocking the site with a 403 error (suggesting maybe it's pulling too much data from OSM's servers?): https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Blocked_tiles

Gigachad

6 hours ago

Open street map servers aren't really meant to be used in end user applications. They are primarily to support the editing of the map data. Usage like this should be with a provider like Mapbox, or your own supplied tiles.

oidar

9 hours ago

Is there no way to open saved documents? Like it won't open a .csv, .txt or .ics file for example?

ArekDymalski

4 hours ago

Yeah, the concept and execution are really impressive but lack of any import is a real blocker I think. Especially in case of spreadsheets - quite often they are not started from scratch, but require previous data or data from other sources etc.

pseudosavant

8 hours ago

That gap surprised me too. But I couldn't find any way to open a saved document. I think it is just based on the URL.

Mashimo

3 hours ago

The word processor is buggy. When switching between touch typing and swiping the cursor ends up in the middle of words.

nearoh

44 minutes ago

The advent of AI being able to reverse engineer anything will lead to an age of open source software being the expectation.

rullelito

35 minutes ago

More like open prompts, so you don't have to trust "foreign" code.

oblio

13 minutes ago

The problem with open prompts is:

If I ask 10 of the best developers on the planet to build me something and describe it in great detail, they will all build wildly different things unless I actually point them at the exact thing. And even then, the intent might be identical and the surface might be identical, but everything else in between will be different. Oh, and quality will still vary even in this best base scenario.

That's going to be even worse with LLMs. We would need the exact LLM model and its overall configuration (for open weights), the exact prompts and then the luck of the draw.

We should still encourage open prompts, but it's not a panacea.

haisin5555

2 hours ago

To be honest, it looks amazing, but it would be great if there is a guide or like a "how to" cause I'm not sure how to use it.

hollowonepl

4 hours ago

I’m waiting until somebody vibe code a proper desktop apps to provide more diversity than MS vs Open Office. just like I see options blossomed in the “Creative Suite” field.

But maybe I’m just one of those who don’t like web office apps and/or google docs related workflows.

datas

10 hours ago

I like stuff like this. Have you considered real time collaboration? Your not to far off from this with something like web sockets.

Edit: realized it looks like the data is stored in the url, which is a neat approach but I guess its not really that close.

nine_k

9 hours ago

It's entirely possible to update the URL in browser without reloading the page.

Permalinks are needed to share documents, which would be something like a link shortener, with the target updating as the document is updated.

Woodi

3 hours ago

Do "office suite" really need to be http app ?? Such hackers friendly trend...

kraf

2 hours ago

This is absolutely lovely, well done!

eviks

4 hours ago

> free office suite where your document is inside the link and easy to share

How is it easy to share megabytes encoded in a link?

inatreecrown2

4 hours ago

The Animator app is nice and simple, I would like to have something like it as a standalone app.

peter_retief

3 hours ago

this is really great, just went through the categories and it is really useful to someone who work like me

rsingel

8 hours ago

What was the recent site here on HN that let you do this but with signs and QR codes?

shevy-java

4 hours ago

I'd wish LibreOffice would have collab-editing by default for everything, as an option.

EGreg

4 hours ago

This is so well done!

The only bug I found is that the presentation previews in dark mode have the text as black on a dark background, when it should be white (matching the canvas text).

kulahan

9 hours ago

If you add a PDF annotation to this, it’d cover 100% of my (admittedly generic) needs. I know how big of an ask that can (used to?) be.

nine_k

9 hours ago

Putting a PDF into the URL is not entirely impossible, but comes with serious limitations %)

johschmitz

2 hours ago

I guess the PDF wouldn't have to be stored in the application/URL? Just a tool to load it, fill+annotate+sign it and export back to disk.

nine_k

2 hours ago

The specialty of all apps here is that the entire document is in the URL.

It's a great idea, but this limits the size of the serialized document to 2048 kiB for Chrome, and 64 kiB for Firefox.

syngrog66

7 hours ago

so... the worst possible way to provide the functionality in question

and the functionality has been available already for decades. solved problems, kiddos