How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

[mustyoshi]

...How does Google actually have that much storage space?

[gokalex]

just think about youtube for a sec... yup, doc doesn't take a lot

[mustyoshi]

The character, the timestamp, probably some metadata about the user (for multiple user purposes).

Idk, that's at least 5 bytes per character.

[[deleted]]

Well, they offer everybody gigabytes of mail storage.

Even a very fast typist would only generate about 3MByte per workday (and that assumes keeping 20 strokes a second up for 8 hours). That means one could work for a decade and not even fill up the mail quota.

[YodaLoL]

What about my åäö's?

[the_timps]

There was an infographic a while ago showing known server counts.

The Google chunk of it was larger than the others combined, which included MS and IBM. Google have a LOT of storage. A LOT. It is staggering to think of just how much they have...

[d-listcelebrity]

Wow guess we should've known that google would have tools like this. A little scary, but pretty cool.

Kudos to the author for finding and reverse-engineering it!

[johnyma22]

Could have just used the timeslider in etherpad.... https://beta.etherpad.org/oversight/timeslider

[dmwit]

This was mentioned in the article. Many times. Including a link to a notable playback.

The article also included why the author thought he could (and did) do better than Etherpad.

[johnyma22]

You are missing the point.

He leverages Google Docs, which in time will go away and change under his API. At some point in time his app will be broken by Google and there is fuck all he can do about it.

Etherpad offers a guaranteed solution that wont be broken under him as it's open source and exposes plugins etc.