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Ask HN: Tooling for Cross-Platform Handbook?

2 pointsby ancasteralmost 5 years ago
I am starting a medical residency, and many departments at the hospital I am at have paper&#x2F;PDF handbooks with in-house protocols and resources. They are often a little out of date and hard to find&#x2F;use on your phone.<p>I&#x27;d like to convert these to a very simple app to improve searching, navigating, and updating the content.<p>Background: I am an ex-software developer, but mostly backend&#x2F;scientific-computing and have never built an app so I&#x27;m unfamiliar with the territory.<p>What framework do you suggest for creating an iOS&#x2F;Android app of what is essentially a reference book with search (i.e. table of contents, chapters, sections with text and images)? My development environment is linux, currently. I&#x27;m looking into frameworks such as flutter and react native.<p>I think my ideally the handbook content would be stored in a public repository, perhaps as markdown, so that it can easily accept contributions &#x2F; issues. Separate code bases would turn the content into an app, PDF document, or website possibly.<p>Thanks!

1 comment

childintimealmost 5 years ago
Flutter acts like a Windows app: you install and use it, bringing sanity to app development. React is like Linux: you be the mechanic. You chose.<p>hackmd.io provides a nice web interface you might use to flesh out the concept and see if markdown works out (I&#x27;m not affiliated). Good plan, good luck.