Staction: Starting To Knock Down My Objections

A few weeks ago, I reviewed Staction, a new workstreaming application (see Staction: Another Run At Workstreaming), stating that the application had a few limitations that made it impossible for me to adopt as my core collaboration tool:

[from Staction: Another Run At Workstreaming]

Personally, I don’t want to get so minimal that I can’t format messages, and Staction doesn’t allow me to write something like this post in the messages it supports. It doesn’t even support newlines to break a message into paragraphs. The alternative, I guess, is to write a document and attach that to a post, but that seems like a step backward for me. I would recommend that they support HTML, Textile, and Smartypants markup for the posts, and that would solve my primary objection to using Staction. (Note: Present.ly ‘solved’ this problem by allowing an arbitrarily long text object to be associated with every post, but I still dislike the ‘on the side’ feel of that approach.)

I also begrudge the lack of an intrinsic notion of links, and since HTML is not supported in the body of messages I can’t create one manually.

While Staction allows arbitrary tags to be used, and searched for, the tags aren’t displayed in the stream, even when the ‘more’ is clicked to show other metadata and the ‘edit’ and ‘delete’ controls. I would suggest an additional tab in the control panel for ‘Tags’ like People and Projects.

It turns out that a new version of Staction was released today that supports newlines in messages. So at least the most basic sort of formatting — paragraphs! — is possible.

Staction , originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

But they seem to turn a single newline into two, so I can’t create a list of with no whitespace between the lines. Grrr.

However, it turns out that if you enter a URL into a message (“/message”) it is handled as you’d imagine: a clickable link is generated.

So that only leaves the question of a fuller treatment of tags to meet my objections to the tool. And just a leetle, leetle more formatting: I really want a subset of HTML or Textile.

My hope is that the nice folks at Paste Interactive will create a simple way to designate some messages as being formatted, and support markup in those at least.