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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."
I suppose Google Base is a step toward the database side of things: http://base.google.com/base
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
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.
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
It doesn't take 10 minutes to setup phpBB, it only takes 5.
10 minutes is the total amount of time the phpBB devs devoted to security design/conding and testing.
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.
I don't know if they are any closer to anything than they were a long time ago. Google referred to Writely as being in beta back in March. I have used it since before Google bought it and the overall experience has constantly improved. I fail to see how today heralds anything new at all. Many people have commented about it here.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Well, I believe that Microsoft's Share Point initiative is something similar to what Google might be about to unleash. The only difference would be that Microsoft's costs more.
Actually, Sharepoint Sevices costs nothing, apart from the base Server2003 licensing. Sharepoint Portal, OTOH, does dig into your pocket. But I imagine most small/medium companies could get by using just the Services portion.
Now shipping as part of Windows Server 2003 R2 or available for download at no additional charge, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services technology in Windows Server 2003 is an integrated portfolio of blah de blah And Sharepoint/Office2003/2007 is FAR more integrated than what Google has produced so far. Doc managemnent, collaboration, customization.
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.
Google has actually created something that is less useful than other free alternatives.
Google bought something that has a feature no other word processor has -- real, real-time collaboration.
I look forward to using it, for just that purpose, to see if it's worth anything at all.
I don't know about multiple users editing the same document at the same time. Maybe multiple reviewing might be ok tough. It seems to me that collaboration is better achieved when multiple smaller units are linked together than having multiple people edit at the same time the same structure. For example, Autodesk Toxik is a compositing software that offers an interesting approach to collaboration : multiple artists can work on different aspects of the shot (compositing, keying, roto/painting, etc) and an artist can link to another artist's work and choose which version of the work of progress he wants to link from. He can toggle between the different versions of the other artist's work on the fly when a new one is published or switch back to a previous one if he decides the new version is not usable yet.
I don't see how editing text can be correctly implemented in a word processor, two people modifying the same document at the same moment can lead to one people overwriting some else's work. Unless, as I said, people work on two completely different aspect/part of the document. It seems clunky to me. I'm not too familiar with word processing applications that allow multiple people editing the same document at the same time tough, so maybe there's just something I am not seeing.
Reviewing on the other hand normally involves multiple people making comments and then a single person integrating the changes. Simply add your review tags in the document (you might even see other people's comments pop-up in realtime like you said) and then one person merges the comments. That would actually work.
Any data placed into Google Base is public. It's not really database functionality, it's more like a tagged and highly structured web page.
The difference is now everyone can register an active account. Before all you could do was give them your email so they could tell you when it would be available.
FYI: Like many Google services, Writely is still in beta even now.
AbiWord's collaboration-enabled 2.6 release will be out before OO.o and Word can catch up, almost certainly. And we have a secret project that will make it even more attractive... :)
--Ryan, AbiWord Dev and Win32 Maintainer
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: http://cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
>> NOTEPAD.EXE has more features than this app
Classic troll, and moderated informative?
Whats your point? Can you give some side by side comparison of features in NOTEPAD.EXE v/s Writely v/s MS Word? Just saying "MS Word is the product of 30 years of developement" is not good enough.
I, for all my personal needs, do not need any desktop base software anymore for my "Office" needs. I used to use Openoffice, but now I dont have any reason to do so. And I have TRIED Writely, just now. It has all the features I need for a software to create a decent document (WITH TABLES), and then a lot more. I can collaborate with others, I can publish it on my blog (yeah, believe it or not, it is an important feature for a lot of people out there), and it supports more than one format (PDF, MS Word, OpenOffice).
Happy trolling...