So I’m posting this
So I’m posting this from Writely… one of Google’s latest acquisitions. It’s an online word processor, and although I’ve only been using it yesterday and today I must say– it’s pretty dope on a rope. I mean, come on, I’m posting this from Writely. Not from MovableType, Writely. I just italicized text from Writely… by hitting ctrl+i… which will then get posted to a MovableType weblog. No HTML needed. Hell, I just spell-checked italicized by right-clicking on it.
It can export to HTML, RTF, Word, OpenOffice, and, hold onto your butts… PDF.
Fuck hoverboards, the future is now.
I’m pretty sure I just heard Microsoft shitting themselves. Wait… hold on, yeah, I just heard it again, definitely poopy pants. Seriously though, there’s virtually no reason to buy Word now. I mean, theoretically there wasn’t before, since OpenOffice is free and has been able to read and write Word files for a while now, but with Writely (and Writely’s brethren… keep reading) the deal is sealed. I mean, it’s a free word processor that’s on any computer with an internet connection. I mean, come oun.
Now there are other Ajaxy-web-2.0-thin-client-browser-based-Word-killer-apps out there, but I think Writely is on to something… and Google would seem to agree.Writely, AjaxWrite and Zoho Writer– I love how everything has “write” in its name– are the “big three” in this game. I say “big three” because really this whole online word processor thing is still in its infancy, really. The problem with AjaxWrite and Zoho Writer (and this is just from my experience of playing with both of them today, so take this for what it’s worth) is that they’re both trying to be Word, rather than replace Word. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s an important one. AjaxWrite in particular is really trying to be Word. I mean look at it. Zoho Writer is a closer competitor to Writely, because like Writely, it actually leverages the fact that it’s online, and allows you to store your documents online, collaborate with other people across the web, post to your blog, blah blah blah. AjaxWrite misses this completely; to quote Nat over at O’Relly Radar“AjaxWrite is no more aware of the network than Microsoft Word 1.0.” As a result, AjaxWrite (I think) really doesn’t stand a chance in the long term.
Zoho Writer and Writely are very similar, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they start allowing users of to port their documents to and from one and other. At the core level, they’re basically AJAX editors that write/format HTML documents on the fly. And like I said before, the both allow users to save their documents online, collaborate with others, compare revisions, import from Word/email, and export to blogs, Word files, PDFs, et cetera. The biggest difference I see between the two is that while Zoho Writer is cool and in some ways nicer than Writely, it already suffers from one of Word’s greatest faults: feature fatigue. (Real quick: “feature fatigue” is the phenomenom that with each added feature a program becomes more useful, but conversely more difficult to use.) Word has an excuse for feature fatigue, it’s 13 years old, Zoho Writer isn’t even 13 months old.
Sure, both Writely and Zoho Writer are lightweight word processors in comparison to Word; but when comparing Writely and Zoho Writer to each other, Writely is truly bare bones, while Zoho Writer looks like… well… Word. There’s buttons all over the place, curvy tabs, drop shadows, blah blah blah. They’re both simple and easy to use once you get the hang of them (and they preempt Word 2007’s “ribbons” to a certain extent), but the fact of the matter is it took me close to three minutes to figure out how to change the name of my document in Zoho Writer. Turns out it was just a matter of clicking on the tab of the document, but if it takes me two minutes to figure out something, it’s gonna take my mom 5 minutes, and my grandmother 10 minutes. And that’s 10 minutes my grandmother doesn’t have.
Now in Zoho Writer’s defense, one of the fatigued features it does have that Writely doesn’t is a word count, and that’s a huge deal to me. Surely there are other features that other people want that I couldn’t give a damn about, but it’s all a matter of balancing the needs of the many with the needs of the few. Spock 4life.
Anyway, this has gone on far too long. Check out Writely and Zoho Writer, they’re both wicked awesome. In the mean time I’m gonna hit this blog post button and see what happens. After that the real question will be can the people that I’m collaborating with post to Bear, because this could just open up a whole new can of worms.
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