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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."
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
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.
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.