Aleksey has been working hard on a very challenging, but essential feature: real-time collaboration.

Because Gingko is card-based, we feel that collaborating in real-time with Gingko is far more user-friendly than in “modeless” editors like Google Docs.

If someone else is editing a card, that card is simply locked and greyed out. You are not distracted by your collaborator’s real-time typing, and it doesn’t feel like a giant chat window (remember Google Wave?).

This is a big feature, and I am surprised by the speed with which it’s being developed. [Edit: June 18th. Turns out there were many hidden challenges, now finally overcome.]

We’re still ironing out some minor bugs with it, but it will be ready for use soon.

We often use Gingko internally as a shared todo list. It works well, since we can have projects, tasks, and sub-tasks arranged hierarchically.

We’ve been using [ ] to denote empty checkboxes, and [X] for completed tasks. This was not pretty, a bit of a pain, and did not give feeling of satisfaction from completion.

Well, we now have proper checkbox support. Just add square brackets [ ], and it will render as a checkbox which you can click to toggle. Making a checklist? Pressing enter will automatically create the next checkbox for you.