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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."
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.
Web apps just can't compete with real apps
This will be a funny quote in a few years.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
What's the point of using an interpreted language when you could compile to, download and execute bytecode much more efficiently?
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.
I think you are trying to use Docs for something it was not meant to to. Basic text processing is something it's very good at. Collaboration without the need to setup servers or special software is also very nice. For text writing and evaluation, all text processors are basically fine.
The problems you are referring to mainly deal with the visual appearance of the text. This is referred to as typesetting, and it is something that I personally would never do in either Google Docs, MS Office or OpenOffice. These tools, while easy to use, are not really designed for the fine grained control you want when creating a book. Typesetting is better done in software designed for that task like for example Adobe or LaTeX if you want to get down and dirty.
This saying goes for every profession: Use the right tool for the job.
What are you talking about? It'd still be in the browser, just bytecode instead of JavaScript.
Bullsh. He's talking about basic text formatting options that are buggy or in some cases, broken. He's dead right about that. Issues abound in Gmail, too... like how signature text and body text are treated differently when composing an email, and often that can bug out and leave you unable to edit the body text because GMail things it's all one big signature. Dumb.
Mind you, similar criticism can be applied to Word, too, it's less buggy than GDocs, but still has problems. Adding a page break then wondering why your new Heading 1 line is also changing the spacing on the previous page... or why you can't seem to move beyond the end of a table at the end of your document to start a new line. Stuff like that.
GDocs has some way to go in terms of usability, even for basic corporate documentation.