Slashdot Mirror
Writely.com Beta - Google's Answer to Word
bahree writes "Google has launched their beta version of Writely.com. Writely is their word processor and answer to Microsoft Word. In addition to the usual editing features it includes many collaboration features, as well as the ability to save documents as PDFs and RSS feeds."
No Opera support? Oh well.. Maybe in the future..
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
... to a complete office suite. I've been using the Google Spreadsheets for a little while from the link in my Gmail account. Signed up for Writely the other day when I saw it on Ars. Pretty neat for an online application. Not too much left for a nice office productivity suite, excpet maybe a database app and/or a presentation app.
I'm sure this will also feature Google's well known "infinite retention" plan, whereby anything you ever write is saved on their backup servers, sent into space as microwaves to be preserved should the earth be destroyed, and also dumped into several randomly selected alternate dimensions so even cataclysmic destruction of our reality can't get rid of your records.
The interface was very easy to use. I'm impressed. Google spreadsheets didnt impress me this much as writely does. Publish, others can edit it, save as PDF....damn its beautiful. I have no complaints. Heck, now I can use this for work to create PDF documents for my co-workers to follow. Yay for Google.....maybe powerpoint competitor next?
What's with the lack of a direct link? Oh right, blogvertising. Forgot.
(check the blog's title for a laugh from the author's mental age by the way)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Doesn't work in SeaMonkey 1.0.4, though I suspect this is an oversight as they have Mozilla 1.6 in their compatability listing.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Does Google keep a copy of everything you write?
Under 10.4.7, set Safari to Mozilla 1.1 as its User Agent (in the debug menu). Writely works great then, even though it is listed as unsupported.
Writely has been available for almost a year. The only news is that they've finished sending invitations to the waiting list and reopened public registration.
Well I am using IE 6 and I had an error as well. I tried to save a test document as a Word file and got an error message. However, I tried again and it worked for all the formats I tried. So it may well be that the error was Writely's - you write (no pun intended) as if a beta version that was just launched (today?) will obviously not have any bugs, when clearly it will.
Deep irony: The website is programmed using ASP.
Will Google be able to turn the pseudo-naive business sector from 1 Microsoft Way? That's what it really comes down to for market dominance. Isn't spreadsheets what launched the Apple II into every desktop anyways? There's nothing like a little healthy competition. Microsoft seems to be catching on, at least with it's new "Live" betas, so over the next few years I think we're going to see some real dangerous stuff from Redmond.
Remember, anything on someone else's server is destined to become public knowledge. It may be inadvertent, it may be because of a court order, a government investigation, a rogue employee, or because someone hacks the server. In the future world of software as a service, where your personal data is stored on someone else's computer, the privacy of that data is only as good as the technical, legal, and political environment makes it. For the US, as recent months have proven, that means there is no privacy you can count on. So be sure you never write about your questionable deductions on your income tax, or your recent affair in the Bahamas, or how you managed to carry banned items on your last airplane trip, or anything else you wouldn't want public, when using this service.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
...or hassles later?
The reviewer says Writely might be useful because downloading and installing OOo is too much of a hassle. Hmm...what about the hassle of managing two sets of files: one on your computer's hard disk and one on the google grid? The confusion when you end up with two versions of the same file, one on your computer and one on google's grid? What about the hassle that comes when you want to edit your document, but you don't have internet access at the moment? What about the hassle when you find out it doesn't work in the browser you have installed on the machine you're using at the moment? What about the hassle when your document gets too big, and Writely's performance starts to be unacceptable?
AJAX is fundamentally a bad idea. It's an attempt to use a web browser and http for something they were never designed to do, and they can't do without browser-specific hacks on the developer's side, and breaking lots of familiar conventions on the user's side. It's also a retreat into proprietary software, at a moment when a full-featured stack of open-source apps is pretty much ready for prime time.
Find free books.
...apply this editor to my dynamic content management system.
http://www.lazd.net/
it's ASP.net! so... Google use Microsoft's technology to answer Microsoft's product. humm...
I don't know about personal files, but I think that I'll be putting my blog posts in there. If they enhance the ability to post to my blog (wordpress) then I will probably actually just write all the posts there. But right now, I'll probably post to my blog, copy the text and then shoot over to writely and save it there. Obviously it is not private, but I like that google will be backing it up for me. The jokes above about it never going away are funny - but really, that is appealing for content that I intend to be public.
And if anyone is curious. The document I posted to my blog went over - but without the title or categories. That gets fixed and it is a nicer editor than the one built into wordpress itself.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
But it still seems a little bare-bones to me. There doesn't seem to be many formatting options... not even a ruler. I'm a little miffed that there's no customization what-so-ever.
Oh well, I'm the guy that thinks that everyone should write their documents in a propper page-layout program, like InDesign, or use a simple RTF edittor for the rest. I really hate DOC, ODF, and all these bastardized rtf/page-layout hybrids, anyway... so I'll probably just stick to using TextEdit and InDesign, like I always have. Unfortunately, work is exclusively Microsoft based (and I refuse to use Publisher), so I'm forced to use Word... so maybe once Writely matures a little, I'll switch to it.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
As opposed to a static content management system?
You've been listening to too many marketoids.
Inserting an image is easy - a dialog pops up asking to browse, uploading was very fast. Clicking on the image gives you handles and when dragging to resize, the image shades and is re-sized easily and centers again. Numbering works as expected, bullets are not aliased circles, but small "diamonds". Keyboard shortcuts like cut and paste, bold, italicize and underline perform as expected.
"Right clicking" in empty pane brings up their menu with cut, copy, insert image, insert link and bookmark, select all etc and the ability to insert 196 special characters
Save as html, rtf, open office, word, and pdf. Also has tags and create RSS. "Collaborate" looks interesting but did not have time to test it. I think this feature is Writely's biggest benefit. Also "Publish, blog, revisions, and HTML Preview menus".
Overall I'm impressed, the only problem I had was creating a colored background.
Namaste
Hmm. .ASPX. All your bases belog to us... I wonder how the asp environment works with the Google grid.
I have discovered a major flaw in this version of the product. It offers Comic Sans as a font!!! Please Google, kill Comic Sans, kill.
It's so secure Homeland Security is only sent ONE copy automatically. Wow that's good!
... ON THE WEB. It's double cool because nobody that works at Google is old enough to know that ;)
I use Google spreadsheet for tracking some clan items in a game, but that's just about as far as I would ever trust Google.
I understand their target(ed) market(ing) is kids who frankly just need to write about sex and drugs, but for any business, or really any adult, Google is just not an option at all.
Still, tis damn cool to have the collaboration of UNIX apps from the 80's
.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Don't know if this is a bug on the service or something but posting to my blog at wordpress.com didn't work, google's other beta stuff works so well, that's why I guess my expectations were so high.
It really doesn't inspire my confidence in the reviewer to hear a) they're running Internet Explorer
It would in fact be a pretty incompetent reviewer that didn't even try it on the dominant web browser (yes, that's still IE, however the trends are going).
b) running a beta version no less
Alright, I'm with you on this one. This falls in line with my "incompetent" description above, since IE beta is not the dominant web browser, and can be expected to have problems.
c) can't tell that it's obviously a problem with IE 7 (Beta 3) (which no doubt Google didn't test it on) rather than Writely.
And neither can you, since you didn't try it on regular IE, presumably (from the rest of your comment). Granted, that's a likely source of trouble, but you say they "can't tell" the problem is IE7 as though you have some evidence that it is true. The real issue here is that the reviewer didn't bother to try it on a more standard browser, not that they didn't immediately know some "fact" you're assuming.
All that said... I ran it on Firefox and had no problems :)
I am the man with no sig!
A freeware word processor to challenge MS-Word. Uh, sure. Now exactelly what is it that makes this Writely thingy any better than Open Office, AbiWord, or any of the DOZENS of office apps out there?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Where are the targeted ads? I would have thought they would have a bank of ads down the right-hand side a la gmail. Then, I only looked at the screenie...
Support the mob or mysteriously disappear.
It may have OD, but it doesn't have password support. Guess I'm waiting for a while.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Google is not in its dictionary.
And the winner is: Writely!
I wrote about Writely a few days ago (and generally liked it). I wrote my own online word processor last year (KBdocs.com for my own use, then opened up free registration - got 1000+ uesers. My system was a 3 evening hack - generally OK, but not feature rich.
Google Calendars has a huge advantage because of the GMail integration. Writely.com's advantage will likely be a good integration with blogspot, etc.
Writely is missing the fundamental concept of page breaks. I imported an ODT and my manual page breaks were ignored, footnotes were all dumped at the bottom of the document (as opposed to the bottom of each page). It wasn't pretty.
It also failed to import the font correctly (I typed the document in ARIAL, not Times New Roman!). Everything else was fine, though.
A browser crash is not the website's fault, therefore, IE7 or Windows (or something else linked into IE7) was definitely at fault here.
Anyone want to start a pool on what CSS/javascript features get broken or removed in future releases of IE7 as Microsoft tries to kill Writely and Google Spreadsheets?
What? Am I remembering wrong, or has Writely been around long before it was a part of Google? I just read the headlines and thought, wait a minute, that makes no sense - how do Writely and Google go together? It was in a PC magazine a few months ago as a featured link, so I don't think this is cutting-edge new, although Google's affiliation may be.
Also worthy of note, this is also not the only thing of its type: Thinkfree Office is also around.
But good to see that services like these are getting more attention. Still, I wouldn't save any documents of even moderate importance online, even if it evolves out of beta.
Slashdot is dead, unlike the parent post.
The trouble with rulers and other real-world dimention stuff (for printing) in web applications seems to be that the CSS features (http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_ref_print.asp) that handle them are not supported in the majoy browsers. The web application has, thus, little to no control over how the document will be printed and how dimentions, page breaks, and margins will be handled. I assume that, for those reasons, there's no point in including a ruler or the like. Hopefully this will change in the future.
the guy posting this is a selfish fish, he links to himself. lets kill his kittens and burn his cake.
But the registrar and nameservers for writely don't match the other google holdings...
So, one has to ask, is it safe?
You will be baked, and there will be cake.
Why does 'Google' show up as a misspelled word on their Spell Check?
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
They explain it here: http://www.google.com/support/writely/bin/answer.p y?answer=38914&topic=8616
The reason is poor design mode support in Safari.
What's so different between saving data on Google Servers
or on your "own" Microsoft computer ?
Do you think you have any kind of control about the information
stored on your computer if you are using a closed source OS and a closed source
office suite ?
Who do you think your computer obeys: you or the company that wrote
the software ?
As a mather of fact you don't even own the software you are using on
your computer: you just own a license to use it...
Why do you think office stores a copy of you ethernet MAC address
on every document ?
Google's target markets are individuals and to some extent 3-4 man business operations. What Writely or Google Spreadsheets provide is usually sufficient for most individuals and small offices.
In fact, Google's office product is much more of a competitor to OpenOffice than to MSOffice. They both target the same market - individuals and small businesses - and have (or will soon, as Google catches up) more or less the same set of simplistic features. Catching up MSOffice in terms of functionality may never be possible for a browser based office suite.
Try; create a new document, save to pdf, open and check the Producer tag. Mine says "OpenOffice.org 2.0"....
At least there's one person around here who has a clue as to what's going on with these new Google apps.
My first impression with Linux was not good. It crashed and I lost a bunch of work. My boss decided to fire me over it. (But I was running it on an overclocked machine with some RAM that I had already suspected was bad. I wonder if that had anything to do with Linux's instability?)
for people who link to their own poorly written blog without stating such in the summary??
Anyway, FWIW, CNET wrote a real review of the Writely Beta a couple of months ago. Writely seems to be missing something very important, unless I didn't notice it in my perusal of the article. It's all very well and good that access to the documents is password protected. But what they also need is for the documents to be optionally autosaved in a strongly encrypted format, so that even if someone gets access to your online folder, they can't (easily) read what's there.
Google seems to think they are miraculously immune to privacy snafus. I know the company is run by some very smart guys, but everybody makes mistakes. This is not an area to which they should be giving short shrift.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I am wondering as to why are they using ASPX and not open source tools like they have traditionally done ? So are they having a windows server farm to run writely ?
You and I say "why can't this support safari,oper,konquerer?" The whole cross-platform concept is very very expensive. It requires developers, testers, a qa qualification process, time, etc. All that is waaay to much (even for a rich company) to invest in every project. Add into this mix the fact that most of Google Labs' ambitious projects... well... fade gracefully into the night... it's just not worth it.
We're all familiar with the process by now. Google releases a new Beta. People use it, or they don't. After a few months, if enough interest remains, Google will start putting some muscle behind its beta. Other ideas don't get so popular and never escape the Google Labs page. (though they don't exactly die either... more like a deep sleep) There are many examples of underdeveloped proof of concept projects at http://labs.google.com/ like the really cool Google Ride Finder. The world just isnt ready for that yet.
Also see Google Suggest, the oldest remaining beta (4 years!!). It's downright crappy webpage is a front for an underdeveloped topic detection algorithm. I wish they'd finish it or open the source
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
I have a crappy machine with a small hard drive. If I installed MS Office, I wouldn't have a whole lot more space left (with the rest of the crap I have on my drive as well). The idea of being able to hop online and write up something and send it to someone is awesome. I am sure they will constantly be adding new features and fixing bugs. It'll be great for kids who might have hispeed or dialup but not Office, as well as schools who might not be able to afford the site license for Office. It might not be perfect, but it's pretty cool. Huzzah to Google and Writely!
Unfortunately kword doesn't open ODT's generated in Writely complaining about "Invalid OASIS OpenDocument file. No office:body tag found."
...or does anyone else also hate the idea of having private documents stored on a server rather than (only) on your own PC?
... another word processor!
Google needs to get a life!
I'm all for Google, use a slew of their services, but, adding one thing after another is ridiculous. Personally, I think that if Google keeps coming up with all this new stuff, they're eventually going to lose scope and focus. It's bad to have a hand in everything, eventually you'll lose track and something bad will happen. Especially since a large majority of all the Google services are still in beta. And, especially in the case of Gmail, one can wonder if they are ever going to come out of beta because Google keeps making other things.
If your blog isn't already hosted on Google, won't you have to give Google your blog login and password so that Writely can save data directly to your blog?
Digital Citizen
The way that most (home users especially) buy computers, they already come with a word processor of some sort bundled with all the other crap the OEM (HP, Dell, etc) sticks on the system. It's nearly impossible to buy a major manufacturer's system without all the preloaded junk, and often times you spend the same or more on the stripped down version. (Yes, you can 'roll your own' system, but *MOST* people don't do that, nor do they know how.) So, most home users have either Works or Word Perfect (Mac's have their own), which is more than adequate for virtually all their text document writing needs. Those that don't have something preloaded can install OpenOffice.org or even Abiword for a free word processor.
Big business, with the typical big-business IT strategy has already chosen (most likely) Microsoft Office to standardize on. The few forward-thinking organizations are already using something like OpenOffice.org.
Many business users of Microsoft Office have 'install at home' rights to their business' license of Office, so those folks can use Office at home as well as at work.
With a 500k maximum document size, limited feature set, and all the privacy concerns that go along with using a Google-owned web application -- the only people that can really get some use out of Writely is people with blogs who can post directly one of the six compatible blogging sites (since blogs are typically published to the public, less privacy issues). And still, you're giving Google your login information for the blog (another privacy concern), so I'd think it's only a viable tool for Google's own Blogger.com users (since Google's already got your login information there).
And, not to forget, a web-based app requires web access of a sufficient speed to use -- and not everybody is hooked up to a full-time high speed internet connection. "Little Tommy couldn't hand in his homework because the internet was down" could become the new "My dog ate my homework", and with reliability problems some broadband providers have, there might actually be some truth to the excuse.
The speculation of a Google-box appliance that big business can install on their own LAN, without the privacy concerns of using a Google web-based application sounds like it *could* be a serious contender against Microsoft Office, but it needs to be a complete and integrated solution suite, and even then it will likely be a tough sell. Google's got a lot of work to do before they're ready for that.
I think it's primarily a traffic generating gimmick for Google (until the above business server materializes). People will use it, but not necessarily need the few unique features it has, simply because "it's there" and they've already been hooked into some other Google gimmick or gadget (mail, calendar, talk, etc).
And neither can you, since you didn't try it on regular IE, presumably (from the rest of your comment).
Yes, but I'm pretty confident a Google employee would've tried it in regular IE before they launched it. They even list it as a supported browser (versions 5.5 and above) under the FAQ What browsers does Writely support.
Usually the most likely cause of trouble is the cause of trouble.
Video Game cheats, hints a
SubEthaEdit was doing this back in 2001. It's a text editor, not quite a word processor, but the basic concept is there, and its design and implementation is far more elegant than Writely's. Cocoa-native, too.
Hmm, it looks like they've gone shareware, registration required. Pity that. Not that I begrudge them the scratch.
Although you mean price when you say "free", it is interesting to note what Google's online services deprive you of.
I'm not free to run Writely on my own LAN so that my LAN users don't have to reveal the content of their documents to Google. For all I know, Google will leak a user's information and I'd rather not give them so much information to work with. They say they "take security very seriously" in their Writely tour but I can't prevent a disgruntled Google employee from distributing copies of information I've written with Writely except to not give them that information in the first place.
I'm also not free to modify Writely to suit my needs. So if I want to run the service on a machine in my house and provide that service to myself over the Internet, I can't make sure that the program does what I want it to do.
Most of the services Google offers are unimaginative and simply not attractive when one considers that they're indexing everything you do with them so that they can build saleable profile on you and possibly inadvertantly leak information to others. I'd rather run locally-hosted free software programs like OpenOffice.org.
Digital Citizen
Yet another "miscrsoft killer" has entered the queue... Big whoop, as it will be as well received as most other MS killers.
The first time there is any report of a stolen document, even if it's a stupid user fault and not a flaw in googles security, people are going to flee from this.
Not to mention the fact that this isn't a word killer at all... Fuck, this thing lacks some of the functions of Wordpad for fucks sake.
Aside from the PDF deal there's nothing to see here. and even the PDF writer really isn't a big deal anymore.
Most midgrade java programmers could have gotten close to this with any incentive. Don't be surprised if some already have surpassed it.
This is not at all ready to replace Word. I have to read and edit (often quite heavily...sigh) dozens of student papers at a time and Word is superb at making that process fast and smooth. Writely would have me pulling out my hair in no time because it is far too sluggish (not to mention simply not as good at editing and commenting).
It is probably great for people who don't do much word processing but until it gets significantly faster it is simply not a good substitute for the desktop version of Word.
oh.. as an aside, Open Office also falls far short of Word in the editing/commenting department. This sucks but it is the only thing keeping me from being able to switch to, say, Linux.
Nah, the difference will be that Microsoft will bloat their offerings so much they won't fit through the office door. Google keeps `em down to the most utilized features -- those worth cramming into an Ajax app.
Privacy issues are a legitimate concern no doubt, but let me tell you: I'm a full time developer on the MS stack - including SharePoint - and the last thing in the world I'd ever want to have to use on a regular basis is a SharePoint portal. I've seen plenty of abandoned SP implementations, mainly over complexity, learning curve and sluggishness of navigation. I've seen none fully utilized.
If Google realizes how many concerns they'd ease by offering strong crypto, I think they'd win over that fraction of the market who, like you, are holding out over privacy conerns. For example, if they offered encrypted storage whereby they had only the public and not the private keys to the stored documents, I'd be fine with storing just about anything on their servers.
Pi Ran Out
You just have to enable the "Mask as Mozilla" option for the site.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I like how you guys always talk about competition for Microsoft. "Writely is Google's answer to Microsoft Word" (which is absurd, BTW). But what about OO.o? Writely and Google Spreadsheet are far more an answer to OO.o than MS Office. OO.o users will be more attracted to Google's offerings than MS Office users. Look for Google to eat into OO.o's share. Hell, it might even kill OO.o off altogether.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Well, its a pretty good app. You can access quick your data, everywhere. Now I think : 1 - Will be this is a next generation(fashion) of web apps? 2 - How many days for a big hole?
I think it's wonderful that Google is making all these web apps for editing spreadsheets, word documents, etc. However, no matter how good these web apps are, they're always going to be limited by being in a browser. I think the ideal situation is one where I can use a web app when I'm away from my computer, but when I'm at my own box, I can use a regular app. In other words, kind of like a common situation with email: webmail when I'm roaming, Thunderbird when I'm not.
To that end, what I would love to see is the ability to mount my Google documents on my box through SMB or somesuch. That would give me the best of both worlds: the flexibility of regular apps on my own box, and access to all my documents through web apps when I'm away. Now that would be seriously cool.
Don't wrestle with pigs; you'll both get muddy, but the pig likes it.
The Purpose of Anti-Trust laws was to prevent large companies from Doing Mean Things. So just because a company is small enough not to trigger an Anti-Trust case, doesn't mean they aren't interested in Mean Things as they start approaching monolith sizes.
MS was the first, and poster case, and at least they have been slightly chastened, if not firmly disciplined. We just saw AOL perform an odd move with customer's search data which should have scared anyone cold. I had missed the official page for the Infinite Data at Google, but I'll take your word for it.
I distrust browser toolbars in general, and once when I tried to remove the PreInstall of Google Desktop from my colleague's work machine, it nuked Windows Explorer. (!!)
I *definitely* distrust the whole "let's operate remotely!" crusade this and other apps push. The flaw is of course that if you are incapable of doing any work unless someone else's server happens to be up, therefore you sign all control of your work away. And this is before the privacy issue arises. If someone is so interested in remote access of their work, then set up a remote to your PC. If you have to give someone else a copy, either load the copy to an encrypted server or email it to them.
Open Office is making thunderous improvements. Within 3 years I expect a solid update, and then everyone can be self sufficient for free.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I have successfully ungoogled myself. I use Scroogle for search, if I have to. I have found that Wikipedia is a good alterternative for much of my search-engine use anyway. I bookmark more, instead of using Google as my DNS. I've gone back to using a News-Reader for Usenet.
Any other suggestions?
zzzzzzzzzz
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
What I'd require to use this is for my computer to encrypt it when it sends it over to Google so all google has is some encrypted data. Then when I want the file again Google sends it back to me I can decrypt it. This way the security sjy-rockets and the service becomes a lot more useful.
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
It'd be nice if Google would eventually offer an encryption system such that no plain-text documents ever saw Google's servers. (ie. It'd need to be encrypted in the client before being saved, and ideally the whole system for this would have verifiable source available.) Collaboration could be a bit of an issue, but it'd still be feasible if the people collaborating on the document could share a common key.
The biggest down side for Google in this scenario is that it wouldn't (easily) be able to scan documents for any future targeted advertising, or whatever else they might have in mind.
All this said, GMail (let alone all the other webmail out there) has already demonstrated that there are massive amounts of people out there who are happy to put personal and sensitive information on someone else's servers. (Ironically for me, I'm also one of them in the case of gmail, I guess.)
First, let's ask ourselves, who might be using this sort of software? Probably not Dad, as the office will set him up with the requisite Microsoft software for their environment. The kids though, they'll be at school, their friend's house, maybe a library if you're lucky. They'll have cell(smart?)-phones that let them moblog to their myspace or livejournal account. Google's deployment of their homepage services to mobile phones is the most revealing as it's a step in a direction towards a different content distribution system.
Writely and Google Spreadsheet (Will we see presentation software soon?) will let students use any computer to edit files. Losing a USB key (or hard drive) with your midterm papers is a students nightmare. The very privacy that we are concerned about when it comes to our porn is relinquished when it comes ensuring we will never lose our critical data. This online software will let students edit papers wherever they are so long as they have a computer and internet. Watch for Google's emerging interests in putting computers in the hands of students, as well as the hands of people who cannot afford them.
As well, the timing of the purchase of MySpace ad rights with the Writely registration release and the nearing school year is circumspect. Google is targeting the largest demographics it can reach for the most impact.
The real question to ask is, what's next?
Neutiquam erro
I've been thinking about the paranoia people are getting about google having access to your sensitive information and I ran some tests... I sent some emails to my gmail account, stating a real hostname and a user/passwd to connect to it, saying it has important files on ftp. I've done this several times and the accounts are never active.
So, this isn't great news for Microsoft.
I didn't test Writely extensively, but I ran quick tests with Firefox on Linux using a 450MHz CPU and Windows 95 on a P166. It ran fine, even on the P166 which is pretty minimal by modern standards. The only thing I tried that didn't work was fonts on Linux -- presumably because the names of the fonts from Writely don't match the names of Linux fonts. I sort of expect that sort of thing with Linux at this stage in Linux development. I'd guess that it might be fixable if I want to devote a few hours to tinkering.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
First things first - Writely is not really a word processor. I cannot see anyone writing a book with this (fair enough, some might say the same goes for Word). It's more like a glorified visual text editor - except that for those used to really powerful text editors, it's not really a text editor either.
Having recently pulled my hair out trying to collaborate on a changes document using e-mails sent back and forth, I told everyone to use Word instead. Without the new fancy collaboration features it's not much more than being able to see changes and comments made by other users, but even that is good enough for basic collaborative document writing.
So what about Writely? I'd suggest the makers of Writely forget about secondary things like layout and formatting. As long as you can export in some common format, you can always take your finished document out and do the layout and formatting in another software. What they could really shine in is collaborative editing with easy to use and powerful tools that I'm not sure even exist anywhere today. There are clever people at Microsoft trying to come up with similar functionality, but it's all tied to their expensive complicated server products like Sharepoint and Exchange.
answer to Microsoft Word
If this was intended to be funny (which I highly doubt), then I didn't get the joke. Seriously, let's see how "journalism" shapes the Google image: Google releases new application X [substitute talk, spreadsheet, calendar, mail, maps, browsersync, desktop search, and so on and so forth] as a new threat to Microsoft application X ! then you find writings like why aren't Google apps successful, why don't Google apps generate more revenue, then again about some Google app Y which is supposedly a Microsoft app Y killer...
I'm simply tired of these formulations, such and similar sensationalistic approaches to about any app release, especially if it comes from Google.
Writely is nice, as G. spreadsheet is nice, and as many other stuff Google does are nice. But if I have to read again about them as some X-killers, I'm just going to bang some heads together.
Apps are apps. Good or bad. Nice or sucker. Whatever. Answer to something ? Killer of something ? Do you care ?!
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Someone would do well to inform the owner of that blog that his horrible abuse of accented characters, Icelandic characters, and a dagger only signifies to the casual and informed reader alike just how mentally deficient he or she is. There's creativity, and then there's just plain stupidity.
ThinkFree does more, works on more browsers, is better integrated with the user's operating system (OMG, I actually get to use all my own fonts?), works with two-byte characters (OMG, I can type in Japanese and the saved .doc won't consist of little boxes?), and offers a stronger user experience (OMG, I still get cut/copy/paste, and undo/redo? And print?). Of course, /.'ers are expected to hate ThinkFree because it's written in Java.
Have fun reinventing the wheel as a stone cube, kids. Knock yourselves out.
And for those of us that cant use Lepoard? ( going to guess most of us G4 owners are out of luck ).
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yes, because no one else would have a clue. It's just so hard to guess!
i've been waiting a few months now...just tried it out yesterday, and i should even write my phd thesis with writely, but i don't seem to find the footers button? isn't there any possibility to put footnotes in a specific document? but maybe it's not designed for this kind of documents...any ideas?
And your mailbox and your CDs and flashdrives.
Now don't you think that Echelon^H^H^H^H^H^H^HGoogle is a couple of altruistic geeks who give away the search engine to help the world.
Google has the ability to alter the data in the case of a national emergency and it has more data it can sell to the highest bider. He who controls the past...
The search is given for free in order to discourage competition.
And after microsoft, others learnt the lesson that you should appear to be the nice guy, or you'll join the "$company is dying" group.
Just so you know. I was there and I saw it all happen.
Just when Redmond goes, "Google maps, broken, check", "Gmail, broken, check", "Gdesktop, broken, check" .... "OK Longhorn is ready to ship". Suddenly urgent messenger comes galloping in, shouting , "hold your horses, we cant ship Longhorn till we break Writely".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...It is sluggish as hell! You know, browser were meant to browse the Web. And the Web is a *data* repository not an application repository.
Check out my cross-platform apps
Find the cheapest deals for "hello grandma" on ebay.
If they combine writely with their targeted ads they'll have a winner... or another clippy.
For what it's worth, this has already been done with Google Browser Sync. It allows you to backup all your personal settings -- passwords, bookmarks, everything -- from your browser to Google's servers. It's a small-ish Firefox extension that so far seems platform independent -- tried on OS X PPC and Linux PPC, x86, and amd64 -- which would suggest that Google has working JavaScript encryption.
So, it would be nice for that to be able to prevent the plain text from hitting Google's servers, but then, that would prevent the kind of advertising they want. Anyway, it wouldn't be useful for Gmail, unless you're willing to use PGP -- and then they still get everything anyone decides to send you in plaintext, and everything you're required to send in plaintext due to the fact that 99% of the world doesn't use PGP. Hell, I try to use GnuPG for my email that runs through my own server, and it still means Google has everything I ever send to/from anyone else's Gmail account -- and you can bet they know how to aggrigate that into my permanent GRecord.
Still, my guess is that most of the truly massive number of people willing to use Gmail are actually, like most people, completely unaware of even the most basic security concepts. Most people seem to have some illusion about security that's some composite of the following:
And it goes on and on and on.
So yes, most people would gladly turn their computer into a thin-client to the Google Grid, if it made their lives easier. Actually controlling their own computers is yet another kind of doublethink -- it's unreasonable to ask for control of my computer on the level that Linux/OSS people want, but I do control my computer, absolutely, sortof.
Sad, really, but what can you do?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Did Google's re-branding of Writely added anything else besides the word "beta" on the title? :P
I am away from "Open office" scene but I notice there is "neo office" project which runs on java.
.doc fle?
What if a P2P hosting distrubuted (yes,needs huge bandwidth) NeoOffice shipped which serves to this need? I mean fire up web browser and quickly edit a
Of course, Neooffice can't run in browser right now. It needs major support/developer force to make it I guess.
Sorry if this idea is completely stupid but there is market for such thing and it is not wise not to give people an open alternative without a cookie expires in 2038.
Here is the suite I talk about. It got nice reviews from Mac people.
http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php
Google's owned this for a while, they haven't done much with it, until they moved it into official Google purgatory err I mean beta. Hopefully this means they will do something with it that makes it more useful although I don't want it to change, the speed and simplicity make this useful. I can write an article and share it with my editing group before I submit it. For the businesses won't like this product crowed, I'm not sure that Writely is for businesses. Sarbanes Oxley would seemingly prevent this for use in many companies and who wants to keep memos about book cooking on the net anyway that makes them easy to find. Of course I cannot think of a company who trusted their documents to a beta product that would be dumb. This product seems more geared to groups, clubs and education. It would be great to be able to write a paper share it with the professor then check his or her comments in the same place. All the while not caring if the paper you plan on putting on your blog is on Google's serves a few extra times.
Is anyone really going to use this for anything but making "Lost Dog" signs? In a corporate environment or even if you're just a small business there's simply no replacement for Microsoft Word. Can your word processor do the following things:
Does it have a concept of "styles" where you can select a style or select content and apply a style to it?
Can you insert footnotes that are automatically numbered properly? If you delete one, are they re-numbered properly?
Can you have header and footer text?
Can you designate text as a TOC item and rebuilt the TOC at will? Can you enter alternate text for a TOC element that should appear only in the TOC and not have to change the text it's linked to?
Can you apply a table style easily without tweeking individual attributes of the table?
Can you copy and paste a table from a spreadsheet into the document?
Can you script the document such that information is retrieved from a database?
In fact, to get me to stop using Word I think the replacement would have to provide more than the above Word features (e.g. apply an XSLT template). Note, Word 2003+ reads and writes XML pretty well now (and it's not just base64 encoded chunks of binary ole specific stuff). I wish, oh I wish, there was a replacement for Microsoft Word. But it just ain't so.
As much as I want to like this kind of product, there is no way my company will let me write a document that can be read by google, the owners of each encountered router and the fine employees of the us government that can *legally* read by non US national data.
As much as Foogle makes me believe Sun's dream of a come back of centralized computing was only too early and poorly marketed, unless they offer a locally runnable copy of their fine software (Gmail, Writely, Spreadsheets), they will never get the corporate customer base.
In other words, no reasons to break chairs in Redmond.
No he doesn't, if he were a marketing rep he wouldn't have singled out Ubuntu specifically.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
....an installation or upgrade of several hundred machines running Windows.
With a central, web based offering, the only thing you need to advice your users for an upgrade is the time when it is going to happen.
With windows based apps it all becomes a nightmare that may not scale and that oepns new vectors of vulnerabilities on each machine.
With a web based application server your possible vilnerabilities are well localized and more likely to be quickly and efficently controlled.
I am not Google marketroid neither, but 15 years of experience in the IT sector give me enough insight to recognize an idea with potential when I see it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
then atleast a competer for dreamweaver. It seems to produce decent html from my (admittedly short) testing..
List of available online word processors
:-) )
gOffice is requires a minimal free, AjaxWrite is Firefox >1.5 only, ThinkFree is Java based. No idea about Zoho though.
On a personal note, I am waiting for some open source edition, so that I can deploy it in my locality (LAN, that is
Another way of looking at it is that a product like this may have the potential to bust the "brainbank" myth if it sucks.
don't you know that www.wrightly.com has also been registered by google? http://whois.domaintools.com/wrightly.com
http://www.alexle.net
I've got privacy worries, but am willing to give these things a shot. --Just limit what ends up being stored there to the set of things you can live with and it's all good.
In these times, if you are doing nasty computing (and you can set your definition of nasty), best do it OSS on a network you can trust. (Your own, if it's that nasty.)
That said, I divide my computing between personal and work related.
Personal:
A google account setup is a great deal for kid computing. No need to worry about application installs and there is plenty of functionality for their needs. Win-win.
That's about it for these services where personal computing comes into play. A lot of my stuff sits on a local SGI and Linux box that I can SSH into from where ever I happen to be. Too bad, these kinds of services are not portable. I can see that becoming huge with people of technical means.
Work:
I'm often at different company sites, with limited network access. Putting core documents on these services means having access to my own knowledge and support base and nearly all necessary files almost anywhere I end up that day. Sure, I can carry a key and do, but these kinds of services are a very nice fallback.
Sometimes you only get a browser. That's a lot these days.
Blogging because I can...
I consider distributing code on an appliance the same as distributing code via any other medium. And so I would expect Google to comply with any licensing arrangements attached to the software they include. If there is F/OSS software on there, they may be required to open their own code.
Altho I agree with most posts saying the service is kinda not needed, but editing text together with your friends is a quite cool show off :)
I like hierarchical menus. Why couldn't writely give us Cut/Copy/Paste in a conventional Edit menu?
Now I know that I am extreme. I've had a Mac preference since the first time I used a menu based GUI in 1986. And the Mac makes menus perfect by putting them in the easily accessible top edge (where you can throw your mouse without thought) and gives you consistent commands across all applications. So I've had it better than most.
And I realize that MS rather just copied Apple for years without ever making the experience as good... menu bars in windows in the middle of the screen where precision targetting was required, and taking up duplicate screen space on every window, and having inconsistencies between applications.
Button strips on the Mac have always been shortcuts. Always always duplicates of something in the menu, so that you always can find something in a hierarchy if you didn't recognize an icon. ( PC icons have always been badly drawn. Tell me how a clipboard immediately means paste rather than... show me my clipboard.) Whereas the rot set in years ago on Windows, where buttons started appearing without menu equivalents. And I know that IE7 and Office 2007 are making things way worse. But even they allow you to turn the menus back on. So I know I have been spoiled, able to get rid of all but a bare minimum of buttons and use the real estate, able to maintain consistency, able to shoot for the easy target with my mouse, not have to actively search a 3D field of little squares for one that looked promising.
But why or why does writely have to decide that there will be no edit menu, you can't turn it back on, there will be lame icon buttons only and not even on the same place in the button strip as Windows has them, and with none of the previously mentioned mitigating factors? It is supposed to be a cross platform application. Yet it mimics if anything the unreleased Windows-specific office 2007 with which almost no real user is yet familar.
I've lost track of a famous quote from something like 1999 about the web setting back user interface design by ten years. Sadly I believe now that it will never recover.
(Note: I don't think that hierarchical menus across the top of the screen are the *only* way. It's just - well - don't mess me around with typical looking designed-by-an-engineer looking botch jobs until you can actually think of something better. I'll all for development of gestures, context sensitivity, and so on. Even simply putting everything into a right click menu would have been better because at least I wouldn't have had to go seeking out the button in a random place on the screen.)
You can choose to pay double for new hardware that works with open-source drivers compared to new hardware that does not. But most home users don't feel the need.
When they say 'launched their writely.com', they actually mean that they're launching the Writely that was already there.
How about an appliance similar to a google-search-box that a business can drop into their racks and will let users use spreadsheets, databases and rich text documents, from their browsers?
Hook all that up with privacy/departmental/outside access options and you have an 'Office' style solution.
For many of the same reasons given above, ThinkFree, which I've found is much more advanced than Writely, isn't going to replace Word (other than for Lost Dog signs) either. I don't know much about the technical aspects of ThinkFree, but for the user, it has a lot more to offer than Writely.
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
I'm testing it out right now on Firefox 1.5.0.6 on Windows 2000. Selecting fonts doesn't work for me.
I'll start a new document. Set the font. I'll start typing and the font we'll have reverted back. Set it again, and then it works. Line break, start a bulleted list. Start typing, and the font hjas reverted back again. It goes on like this with all sorts of problems.
I'd be very interested in using something like this, if they made it work better.
Isn't this just another wiki?
We were writing documents with hundreds of pages a decade ago using Word.
Unfortunately, Zonk won't be reading your comment. At least not here.
However, I took the liberty of snail mailing it to him:
Michael Zenke
3101 Stratton Way
Madison, WI 53719
Of course, you could give him a courtesy call: (608) 845-6941
...a couple hundred bucks, per seat, for openoffice.org?
This is really a "word killer". It's hardly a Wordpad killer. It's just a very very simple document publisher but apart from looking pretty slick, does anyone really thing this is a replacement for the word processor? It's cute and all but if Open Office isn't sufficient, this sure ain't. I believe people are mislead by the fact that 90% of Word's features don't get used by the average person. While this is true, this doesn't mean they aren't required. If 1% of a companies Word using population uses Mail merges, they have to be available in any replacement product or it's a no go.
"Writely.com Beta - Google's Answer to Word"
Word is a question?
As to my understanding of public key encryption, you're ultimately right: I understand *that* it works, but it beats the hell out of me how. Seems kinda like magic. ;-)
My goal is to offload some of the crypto workload to the server, while minimizing the security risks that introduces. This calls for server-persisted data to be low-value, and server temp data to be medium-value at most. A single document's content is one thing, but a symmetric key is quite another.
A good design would keep the processing simple for any browser extensions it called for. In this case, it'd be pretty trivial to implement a modified HTTPS scheme using one or more persistent, server-side public keys. This could be in lieu of or in addition to encrypting the wire transmissions.
This scheme's main vulnerability would be to an insider or man in the middle attack on an individual document, by inspecting or siphoning off your session data. This is a pretty casual security implementation, so I think that's an acceptable risk. The alternatives are to do everything on the client side, or to make your symmetric key available to the server during the session. Those are both unacceptable situations to me. My scheme may be less secure than doing everything on the client, but the trade-offs here feel about right to me.
Of course, I'm open to other implementation ideas if you have them.
Pi Ran Out
I'd say you could use your Google account password (along with a bunch of other data) to *seed* the key pair, but I wouldn't feel secure simply reusing it with a different hash function.
;-)
As to whether anyone from Google is listening, I don't understand why this sort of thing isn't already an open standard like HTTPS. When you're the responsible entity for many users' data you have legal liabilities, and you'll most likely have to deal with the tension between users' privacy and your own legal obligations at some point. Why even put yourself in that position?
This seems too obvious not to be in widespread use. Doesn't it strike anyone else as backwards that Google (for example) could not turn over a user's password even under federal pressure (they simply don't have it), but they can be forced to cough up all of that user's *data* (since they do)?
Done the way I suggested (see other responses to grandparent), fishing expeditions through user data en-masse are stultified. Sure, an agency could subpoena the encrypted data for some user and then proceed to get a warrant to pry the private key from the target, but that's the way it should be: secret searches and data mining are out the window, and law enforcement still has its normal discovery instruments available via warrants, same as if the data were on its creator's PC instead of a third-party server. Seems to make life a lot less complicated for data maintainers.
True, ad selection algorithms would need reworking to accomodate the brief nature of content visibility on the server, but if Google doesn't do this, I'm sure some challenger will. Hell, if some challenger doesn't, *I* will - who wants to help me with the XPI for Firefox?
Pi Ran Out
There's no "g" in the name. Oh wait I see there is a "Beta" in the name. Yeah only Google would promote something still in the Beta stage.
SOMEbody had a dry, twitchy-ass no-sense-of-humor...
slash image word: browns (and, how appropriate for the one which zap-modded me...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I really like Zoho Writer. As a product it feels a lot better than Writly. But Writly has one killer feature: spell check!!!
It's an interesting approach. Instead of trying to take on Word using the billion-dollar approach, or the free software approach, it's starting from the "free and easy / casual user" end of the spectrum. Presumably it wants to get the demographic who would normally use Notepad instead of MS Office, and then translate that into installations in small workplaces and teams. It's a long-term, slow-growth approach that may well force Microsoft to make extensive changes to its word processing options in order to counter it. This won't necessarily mean adding yet more features to Word, but it might involve beefing up the Notepad and Wordpad-equivalents in Vista to add internet integration.