This is a great idea. Microsoft Word-style version control (track changes) is not nearly as simple and powerful as Git (assuming you have already wrapped your head around Git, which isn't a reasonable expectation for many non-programmers).
I would love to have something like this for collaborating with non-technical authors on academic papers. Having a granular view of changes in an academic paper (or really any technical document) is really important, especially if you have grad students or research assistants making changes that need to be approved by the principle investigator.
Google Docs sort of does this, but it doesn't support any kind of citation management. (All citation management possibly excepting Papers2 sucks; BibTex seems too technical; but this is a whole other thing.)
But this looks way better than version control in Google Docs. If it really is easy to use and it works with some system for citation/bibliography management, I think academics would love it.
(Academia is the place where I personally see the greatest need for this. I don't mean to ignore or detract from other use cases that may be more prevalent.)
Totally agree with you on academia needing this. I know a bunch of people (including myself) who are interested in trying new ways of authoring papers, theses etc - whether it's MarkDown, latex etc. But once you need to collaborate with someone else, or even receive feedback etc (which as a grad student is pretty much always), we just end up back in Word.
I think building something on the backend of Git would be awesome. My prof is pretty computer savvy and open-minded, but I am not going to be able to get him to do a pull request for every change... and neither would I want to. You need to view the changes in-document, easily do comments etc. I'm looking forward to seeing people try to crack this nut!
Document management
Change tracking
Support for external version control systems (RCS, CVS, SVN)
Comparison of different versions of the document
Branches for having different versions of the same document
Yellow sticky notes
I've tried LyX. It's not bad, but the killer is, as houshuang says, collaborating with other people. It's not simple or slick enough that I can ask my supervisor to set it up to add his comments on a paper. I sent him PDFs for a while, but when I couldn't get the Bibtex references formatted quite right, I gave up and used a word processor. I'd love to see something better in this space.
(I'm not the poster you replied to, I just have a similar view)
I would love to have something like this for collaborating with non-technical authors on academic papers. Having a granular view of changes in an academic paper (or really any technical document) is really important, especially if you have grad students or research assistants making changes that need to be approved by the principle investigator.
Google Docs sort of does this, but it doesn't support any kind of citation management. (All citation management possibly excepting Papers2 sucks; BibTex seems too technical; but this is a whole other thing.)
But this looks way better than version control in Google Docs. If it really is easy to use and it works with some system for citation/bibliography management, I think academics would love it.
(Academia is the place where I personally see the greatest need for this. I don't mean to ignore or detract from other use cases that may be more prevalent.)