Tiny Little Office

(tinylittleoffice.com)

156 points | by donohoe 4 hours ago

13 comments

  • alexpotato 2 hours ago
    As a kid in the late 1980s, my dad got me a PC (an Olivetti IBM clone to be precise).

    I distinctly remember that there were separate apps for spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 [0]), charts (Harvard Graphics [1]) and word processing (Chi Writer [2]).

    And now we just have a basic office suite for free in one website.

    0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3

    1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Graphics

    2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChiWriter

  • simonw 3 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 1 hour 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.
      • simonw 4 minutes 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.
    • hmokiguess 3 hours ago
      thank you, this explains much better, so it's kinda like https://bento.page/
  • oijkuij 2 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 1 hour 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 31 minutes 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.
    • stackghost 1 hour ago
      There’s also https://github.com/nathanvy/singlebook which looks like the same philosophy but for documents.
    • xiangc 53 minutes ago
      [flagged]
  • yellowapple 2 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 7 minutes 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 3 hours ago
    Is there no way to open saved documents? Like it won't open a .csv, .txt or .ics file for example?
    • pseudosavant 2 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.
  • ent101 3 hours ago
    can I do a PR for live collaboration? to be transparent, I'm going to use my own project puter.js for webrtc, but the project is open-source (https://github.com/HeyPuter/puter)
  • datas 3 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 3 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.

  • rsingel 2 hours ago
    What was the recent site here on HN that let you do this but with signs and QR codes?
  • mattoxic 2 hours ago
    I was musing on something like this. There is non zero chance that some US administration disables GSuite / Office365 for all of us living in shithole countries.
  • syngrog66 1 hour ago
    so... the worst possible way to provide the functionality in question

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

  • kulahan 3 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 2 hours ago
      Putting a PDF into the URL is not entirely impossible, but comes with serious limitations %)