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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."
... 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
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.
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.
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?
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 have discovered a major flaw in this version of the product. It offers Comic Sans as a font!!! Please Google, kill Comic Sans, kill.
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.
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?
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.
It's the usual advantages from online stuff with some extras. You don't need to install anything, it's automatically always the latest version, accessibility, online real-time collaboration. But I'm not saying with that that it's better, because these offline clients offer tons more features, isn't dependant on network availability, feels more safely stored on e.g. a local drive, or corporate LAN. But it's different, and Google sees a niche.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
...or does anyone else also hate the idea of having private documents stored on a server rather than (only) on your own PC?
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).
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
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
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.
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.