Google Writelys home new version of online word processor

by on August 20, 2006

Steve Newson talked about Boing Boing’s discussion of a new Google Writely (word processor for the Web) and then said something I found interesting cause I was thinking it too: “For now I’m going to stick with Live Writer…”

Why?

Cause I don’t use Wordprocessors much anymore and when I do (to print out a fax cover page, or something like that) then I just fire up my copy of Word 2003. Now, would I write a book in Writely? Maybe, it sure would have made collaborating with Shel Israel easier. But, really, what I wanted to do was just stay in my blog tool anyway.

The only reason we used Word was cause our publisher told us to. Hey, they were paying us money so we weren’t gonna argue with them.

One little aside: did you notice that Newsome didn’t link to Boing Boing? Damn, how did I find it? Easy, I subscribe to Boing Boing, by his talking about Boing Boing I just made sure to check out the Boing Boing feed and away we go. No link necessary.

Oh, there are some of you who don’t subscribe to Boing Boing? What kind of freaks are you? Heheh.

Anyway, back to Writely, why do I like offline editors better? They just feel better for editing blogs. Plus you get a separate icon on the Taskbar, so you can switch between browsing and editing without making a mistake (how many of us have stupidly clicked on something to watch our blog post disappear as the browser refreshes?)

I also like being offline incase Internet connectivity goes away. I’ve had it happen more than once that something goes wrong and my Web browser decides to refresh for some reason, wiping out a post.

It’s why offline is so good.

  • How about Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional costing $499.00 now that everybody can create PDF files for FREE?
  • Yikes. But that's aimed more at professional publishers who have magazines, brochures, and such, and have paid a lot to develop that content and want to get it online.
  • Google trying to capture everything, penetrating in every possible sphere of web and document processing, likewise microsoft did an attempt time ago, but was stopped, who is going to stop Google now from taking over the computer world? Everything in terms of evolution seems to be right, but the perspectives of being summond to one Company -logo, is not so fairy. ALthough there is a flows in the new writter, but with the massive financial backing development team will solve the problem on a short notice. Hoodia Gordonii Plus.
  • Evan
    Qumana is what I think I'll be using myself.
  • Yes Scoble I agree with you on offline editors. We don't have 24-hours internet connectivity everywhere in the world. A few days back you talked about Microsoft messenger becoming a resource eater. I think same is the case with Google when it comes to Internet. I am in Pakistan and here we usually have 56K dialups. So most of us here have disabled gmail chat because it slows everything. Probably they have forgotten that people use slow internet connections in the world. (www.google.com.pk still has Google groups in its main page. So they have forgotten us somewhat :P at least) Same goes for yahoo. A yahoo email takes 1-2 minutes to open :(.

    Obviously everyone cannot use online calendars etc. as well.

    There should be a decent compromise between what should go online and what can be done offline.

    By the way, you need to give transcripts on PodTech’s site. Some of us might want to read instead of downloading audio/video.
  • For blogging writely is no match for Live writer.
  • Writely saves the content automatically every 10 sec. And hence losing the content would be minimal.

    But I do understand that when you are used to some software, and if you really like it, you don't really find the need to switch to another one.
  • .writely.com/Doc.aspx?id

    ASP.Net Woot!
  • Robert, as for the separate icon in the taskbar, I've seen the future ... from Zoho. It's coming soon, keep your eyes open :-)
  • If you think about how much of your life is already online adding another aspect to the mix probably isn't that damaging. If my internet ever goes down I go out and get some sunshine for the rest of the day because I know I probably won't be as productive offline.
  • Ross: the problem is that sometimes when the wireless disappears it causes the browsers to crash or refresh and then all your work is gonno.
  • Zoli you know how to tease a geek, don't you?
  • I would say that I am online, or capable of being online 80-90% of my waking hours. At work I am online all the time. For many tasks, I don't see why I wouldn't use something like writely. I actually do this a bit with writeboards from 37signals. If I have connectivity, I tend to type in notes directly into a writeboard. If not, I use use a text editor and then upload when I am online again. Usually works.

    IMO, for collaborative work, Writely and the likes beat offline word processors. While the time hasn't come yet, I can see the Writely's of the world becoming more widely used over the next decade.
  • Michael
    "how many of us have stupidly clicked on something to watch our blog post disappear as the browser refreshes"

    You should try this on Writely; that's one problem they've solved well.
  • Lee
    Writely is fine for light writing like blog entries. Serious word processing requires more features: table of contents, indexing, real styles, headers and footers, columns and compatibility with Track Changes to name just a few.
  • I've been using Writely at work for about a month now. At first I had a little bit of trepidation about it (to put it in context, I spend 90% of my work time in emacs), but it's great. Turns out, having lots of people read and comment on your docs as you create them is a pretty big deal; also, for stuff like "to do lists" it's a really easy & quick way to keep them up to date. For instance: we don't email status lists around and get huge email threads of status; everyone concerned just edits things in our status doc as they see fit.

    Imagine a real-time, WYSIWYG Wiki. Writely's strength isn't -- in my mind -- as a word processor per se. Think about it more as a tool that lets you create 50-page documents with the same level of collaboration with which you'd write lists on physical whiteboards.

    And, yeah, the autosave feature is pretty solid too :)
  • Robert, I sure do .. would you like a preview? :-)
  • Google/Writely/Google spreadsheets autosave as you type every few seconds.

    Leopard's version of Safari (and in time, other browsers who copy this feature) warn you before closing a browser window or refreshing a page if you've entered text into a form.

    That sounds like a nice amount of warning to me. I vote for online - work and home no longer need "syncing."
  • Brewster
    "How about Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional costing $499.00 now that everybody can create PDF files for FREE?"

    Everybody except Office 2007, since threatened to sue Microsoft if it did (built-in). ;-)
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