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Google Rebuilds Docs Platform
mikemuch writes "In addition to offering faster, desktop-like performance, better imported document fidelity, and more features found in standard Office apps, Google's new infrastructure for its web-based office suite will enable the company to more easily update the apps. A side effect (or benefit, depending on where you sit) is that the new platform will ditch Gears in favor of HTML 5. For a while starting May 3 there will be no offline capability whatsoever. Collaboration is a big focus, with a new chat sidebar and real-time co-editing. The new Docs and spreadsheet apps will be opt-in previews, but a new drawing app is launching fully. Both go live later today on the Google Docs site."
Does anyone else think the submission sounds like an ad copy?
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"faster, desktop-like performance..." - Google will love this...
It's funny that people are so fixated over the video tag discussion that a lot of the other outstanding features of HTML5 are being overlooked. There's offline storage, javascript threads, and even in browser form validation. The awesome thing is that a bunch of these features are already implemented in various browsers. It's just a matter of including a simple javascript sniffer to determine if a client supports it or not. You can dig into the features over here.
A news website, with a summary that sounds like a press release.. nothing wrong here.
Not a marketing guy, but as I understand it a press release is different than normal advertising copy - it's news (in this case, news for nerds)
It still sounds like a shitty web app, less usable and practical than OpenOffice.org. And OpenOffice.org is pretty bad to begin with, too.
Web apps just can't compete with real apps, and will never be able to as long as we're using JavaScript as the programming language to implement these apps. JavaScript is just not suited to large-scale application development, especially something as large as a full-featured word processor.
... Google CEO Eric Schmidt took a dump today, while at the same time promising to build media bias into the user experience.
No matter what Google does, it turns up on Slashdot! What if Google decided to let one out -- would it feature /.?
Anyway, I'm really glad they're doing this, since I'm one of their Google Docs fans -- It simply puts the cloud in my computing!
You you like just another M$ shill.
If "real-time collaboration" and "side chat bar" sounds familiar, it's Etherpad:
Etherpad.com
Google bought the company few months ago in order to improve their Google Wave and Google Docs offerings, and I'm happy to see these efforts come to fruition. Google left the Etherpad.com service up for some more time. The end of that grace period is April 14-th (2 days from now), so you have 2 days to go and check what the new Google Docs will probably feel like. Make sure to check out the timeline replay feature, downright eerie and good fit for Google's pattern of Ubiquitous Tracking of Everything, I think.
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
I don't get why we're still using JavaScript for everything. What we need is a bytecode-based platform like Java or .NET but completely open and managed by W3C, totally integrated in the browser instead of a plugin and with a minimal standard library that only does math, DOM, etc. It would sure as hell beat crazy hacks like compiling other languages to JavaScript.
I thought off-line storage was a big part of HTML5? Hell we're even using it now with our iPhone apps. There are a lot of things I like about google docs. It's great because we have a Joint Venture with a company in San Francisco where we're based out of St. Louis. We can edit in real time using Skype for voice and then see what people are editing in a text document or spreadsheet.
But Microsoft Office and iWork are both on my MacBook Pro. Why? Because sometimes I'm on an airplane and need to finish up that presentation for tomorrow or write a report, etc.. Or I'm riding in a car doing the same through the backwoods where the cell towers don't go. Until I can, Google Docs will not be replacing Office or iWork as my everyday office tools.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
real time co-editing... i wondered how it was possible that nobody had not yet offered it. no,it is not that i was the only one on the planet that thought about it (google did too :P ). bah,i hope they do well implementing it. i will be curious to see it in action. ideas mean nothing when you are not capable of materializing them...
I recently took part in a collaborative project, resulting in a published book, which was done by means of Google Docs.
I was underwhelmed. I used only the "document" (word processing) tool. There were scores of little clunky things about the user interface, many puzzles and problems involving document exchange and permissions, and the "feature-completeness" of the application was maybe late 1980s.
But what really got me was that the basic editing operations were unreliable. I would insert a 12-point subheading above a 10-point text paragraph and the whole paragraph would change to 12-point text, stuff like that. Two sections might both show normal single-spaced line spacing within the editor, yet the final PDF output would render one of them as single-spaced and the other as double-spaced.
After a while I thought perhaps it was an incompatibility with Safari, although Google does not suggest any such thing, and switched to Firefox. There were still continual problems of this kind, popping up randomly; perhaps not as often and perhaps not exactly the same as under Safari.
If this were running locally under Windows or Mac OS, people would roll on the floor laughing at it. Apple's TextEdit or Microsoft's WordPad would blow it out of the water. If this is the best Web 2.0 can do, local PCs are safe.
The thing is, the press writes about them as if Google Docs were a full-featured, commercial-quality applications... as good a substitute for Word as, say, OpenOffice. It isn't. Under some conditions I guess the collaborative features make it better than nothing (the book got finished).
No doubt the marketers will spin it out endlessly by with continuous frank acknowledgement that whatever is the actual Google Docs you can get now IS a joke, it is the NEXT one that will be desktop-application quality--just as the next version of Windows will be secure and easy to use. We will see. But the current Google Docs, if considered as a serious alternative to a locally-hosted application, is a joke.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Last time I looked at Google Docs, I couldn't create a new style or modify the properties of an existing style. So it seemed to me that it was quite useless as a word processing app. Like Wordpad but slow.
The possibility to collaboratevily edit a document is really cool. But the situations in which this one feature outweighs the disadvantage of having to use some slow Wordpad alternative are quite rare for me. Last time I had a use for a shared doc it was spreadsheet over a year ago.
like just another M$ shill. No, I guess I'll stay with the Stones' lyrics.
They're the ones who want to keep JavaScript and HTML for everything. Don't let them screw the pooch again.
Just like real-time co-driving - see, there are two steering wheels...
How does Google docs handle access to shared resources? In my mind I see "official" logos approved by the marketing department, or spreadsheets and diagrams put out by the finance department. In the current model, resources are kept in file shares and access is controlled by security tokens issued at login. What is Google going to do to offer similar functionality in the cloud? How are they going to provide controlled access to often used resources? Another example might be a document template (ie. a press release, etc).
The same question goes for Microsoft and other companies who are trying to move their productivity applications into "the cloud". How are they going to integrate the products into their directory so that access to resources can be controlled? How are they going to provide shared storage for often used assets?
I am really surprised they still haven't implemented revision tracking in their document editor. I don't have to generate many office-type documents, but a few months ago I was working with two other (non-techie) co-workers on a somewhat generic "statement of purpose" document. My first thought was to use Google docs to make it easy; but then we discovered this shortcoming. For a system that's ostensibly about collaboration, this seems like a huge oversight.
#DeleteChrome
like just another M$ shill. No, I guess I'll stay with the Stones' lyrics.
I guess you forget M$ licensing another stones song for Win 95.
Actually, no, but I'm just getting tired of all the "google is here and there" crap. Do I use Google in a gogol different ways? You bet, and I love it -- and I support it -- but it saddens me to see that good news are left out and replaced by what we can always predict.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
I'm with you. My pet peeve with Google Docs is that the page randomly scrolls to different parts of the doc while I'm editing--and not due to anyone else editing.
Web apps are awful, and I'm saying this as a professional author of them. Maybe in another 5 years, we'll be back where we were in 1984, UI-wise. With an infrastructure that wasn't designed to handle them, web apps are also harder to write than desktop ones. Their one saving grace is that you don't have to go around porting or installing them, which can be significant in a cross-platform environment. As for me, my UI Nazi tendencies keep me on local apps whenever possible. See http://www.subethaedit.net/ for how apps ought to be.
Man, it's a good thing we shot that guy in the face. Imagine humanity living together in peace, exploring the cosmos and improving the standard of living cooperatively. *SHUDDER*
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Google Docs is free. Free as in beer. And it runs on every OS. Making a comparison to OO is fine, and valid. OO is definitely superior for ONE user on ONE machine. However, it's bloated, requires java, and has dozens of other aspects that I don't like at all.
That said, I'd use either in place of paying for Microsoft Office. I really can't understand anybody's preference to MS Office over Open Office. I've made all of my students turn in their work in Open Office format. I've had 2 complaints over hundreds of students. Both admitted that their gripes were small, along the order of "It's not what I'm used to!"
Google Docs is getting better all the time. The writing is on the wall, in my opinion, and definitely no machine I administer will use anything other than Google Docs or Portable Open Office.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
[No offline capabilities....] I thought off-line storage was a big part of HTML5?
It is. That's why this preview version doesn't have offline capability. Google Docs currently uses Google's proprietary Gears system for offline storage. The new version will replace that with functionality based on (draft) standard HTML5 Local Storage. The new HTML5-based offline capability isn't complete yet, so the preview version of the new interface doesn't have offline capability.
Or I'm riding in a car doing the same through the backwoods where the cell towers don't go. Until I can, Google Docs will not be replacing Office or iWork as my everyday office tools.
The non-preview version of Google Docs has had offline capability for quite some time, based on Google Gears.
When the new version of Docs replaces the old version, rather than being available as a preview to show of the new interface and collaboration features, it will have offline capability, based on HTML5 Local Storage.
No one is forcing you to come to /. sunshine.
Maybe Google needs it's own section, I'd say not as I don't want to clutter up the interface (any more) but really, harden up and stop crying about the stories you didn't want to see because it shattered your fragile view of reality.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.