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AjaxWrite to "Compete" with MS Word
prostoalex writes "Michael Robertson (of MP3.com, Linspire, SIPPhone, GizmoProject and MP3Tunes.com fame) is launching a Web-only competitor to Microsoft Office by creating a suite of applications replicating Microsoft Office look and feel. From the posting: "But ajaxWrite is just the start. We have a library of applications we have been working on to replace most of the standard PC software titles. Every week we will launch a new sophisticated program on Wednesday at 12:00 PST on ajaxlaunch.com. These programs will push the boundaries of what people believe is possible today with web-delivered software. These programs look and operate much like their traditional software cousins, but are cross-platform, loaded dynamically, and are available to users at no charge. I'm convinced if you try a few of these products you will understand how the software business will fundamentally change." ajaxWrite is the first launched product."
Support for DOC is not good at this point. Open any doc file and watch the simplest format be mangled. Save an Awrite doc file and then open it in word...marvel at the fantasticrapistally mangled doc. Nice idea...needs work...lots of work.
Dave
Quick review... Problems: ...making it useless /. very well, it's really slowing down.
1. spellchecker isn't working yet (there, but grayed out)
2. I will let you close the window and loose you work without a warning. That's a big minus in my books.
3. And it's not handling the load from
Other that that it looks okay. Like most of the web mail apps from Yahoo and Google. Expect that I like the drop down menus, very intuitive and easy to navigate if you use regular word possessors. They will need to add online storage to make it really useful.
Exactly.. it me be ok for some things, but given the vagaries of the net, you might not be able to rely on it to edit a file. I have the same problem at work with Office delivered VIA Citrix. It will lock up in the middle of editing, or I won't be able to lauch the application. I fixed that problem by installing Open Office.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Apparently it lets you save to your HDD, and I need to know how to do that for annother application. I'm checking it out now...
This is one reason why web-based applications might not be such a good idea:
The connection was refused when attempting to contact 207.67.194.7.
I'm sure many other people can come up with other reasons, such as error 500...
Yet the web has always been lacking in the interface. This application is an amazing glimpse of things to come.
Sorry dada, but you need to get out more.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
What do you think the J in "AJAX" is for?
Seriously, my GMail composer has more features, including spell check, just for writing an email. This ajaxWrite just took firefox's rich text editor and threw tabbed DOMs into the picture. Completely unoriginal, there are significantly more advanced open source editors like the FCKEditor out already(That's a link to their demo, not their index just fyi).
Regards,
Steve
Last time I checked, MSWord doesn't get Slashdotted.
but I could not get it to save, at all.
I'm guessing that's because their server is Slashdotted. The only way to convert a file from HTML is to upload it to the server, convert it, then send it back to the client. If the server is a little busy at the moment... well...
Me thinks he needs to buy time on the Sun Grid Engine.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Where Writely. I tried it out and it's pretty good. As far as web based word processors go. Seems to have a lot of features that AjaxWrite is missing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2003 costs about $125, and can be run on three different computers.
Microsoft stresses that this version of their Office 2003 is only for non-commercial use. You qualify for this edition so long as you are 1) a full- or part-time student enrolled in a K-12 institution, 2) home-schooled, 3) taking at least 6 credits at an accredited college/university, or 4) a full- or part-time faculty member and work 20+ hours at a school.
When I bought my copy, I had a child in Kindergarten. A year later, and he still hasn't used Office -- but my wife and I did.
Sorry for that advertisement for M$ products.
Oh yeah, I frequently use Open Office -- which is free, does a great job most of the time, and runs on almost everything.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
That is because Ajax, which the Word Processor is based on, has to be "tweaked" for each web browser in order to work. First it is Mozilla Firefox, maybe next they will support Safari, Opera, IE 6.0, etc., but only after writing a modified version for those browsers and have the web site detect the browser type and load the correct Ajax script. I already had this discussion on the Microsoft Atlas story on the limits and compatability of Ajax and Javascripts.
As someone else noted, this is basically a Wordpad type replacement. No spell check, no grammar check, no advanced features that MS-Word users have relied on.
Corel Java Office was once in Beta testing, but Corel removed it. OpenOffice.org is written mostly in Java, but its Word Processing ability is a lot more advanced than AjaxWord.
If you want more than a Wordpad, and you don't mind downloading FOSS try AbiWord it can edit and write Word documents as well. It has been ported to Windows, Linux, OSX, etc. Unlike OO.org, it has a small footprint.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
And pdf sucks anyway.
PDF does not suck. PDF rocks! The diabolical combination of MS Windows (The OS that can't multitask its way out of a wet paper bag), Adobe Acrobat Reader (the bloated and glacially slow reader), and your favorite flavor of browser sucks. People click on a link in their browser then scream as their system grinds to a halt while the reader launches and the PDF downloads, which can take significant time. The the reader itself is slow due to trying to multitask with the browser. That sucks.
PDFs on Linux or OS X are much nicer, especially when viewed by a separate program instead of a browser plug-in and especially when not using anything from Adobe. It is sad that the people who pretty much invented the standard now have such a popular and horrendous implementation of it.
I opened an incredibly simple openoffice document and it removed the indentation from all my paragraphs...indentation isn't an "obscure" feature.
*Ahem* From ajaxbrian on their forum:
(Emphasis mine.)
So either you're trolling, or you're not very bright. Next time keep in mind that, "fools rush in where Angels fear to tread."
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Just after opening AjaxWrite, OS X crashed. This has *never* happened to me before. Does anyone else have OS X crash on them too when they tried out AjaxWrite?
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
I have used Foxit reader for PDFs for some time now. It's < 1MB in size and doesn't require an install (or at least didn't if you downloaded the zip). I have found it to be pretty good, loads so fast it's unbelievable. There is also a pro version which you can pay for which gives you some limited editing capability. Here is a link
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great