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Google Rebuilds Docs Platform

Posted by Soulskill on from the further-encloudificating-your-grocery-list dept.

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."

12 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. HTML5 Features by WankersRevenge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:HTML5 Features by CopaceticOpus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Good points. It makes no sense to take features which have proved useful on the desktop and make them available in the browser environment. Also, someone needs to stand up and tell people to stop developing these browser based applications.

      If you want to edit a document, you should install a native application on every PC you want to access it on. You should have to sort out all the details of network storage and collaboration yourself. If you don't have the time or expertise to set that up, you don't deserve to be editing documents. If you accept the convenience offered by such online companies, don't be surprised when many horrible things happen to you!

    2. Re:HTML5 Features by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In a world where 99% of everything is broken, strictness isn't really a virtue...

    3. Re:HTML5 Features by Nadaka · · Score: 5, Insightful

      On the contrary, in a world where 99% of everything is broken, strictness really is a virtue. Strictness allows people to realize what isn't broken in an endless morass of crippled partial implementations. Eventually, things can be fixed. Computers and the internet do not have to be something for which everyone has resigned to being broken.

      "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. "

    4. Re:HTML5 Features by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you accept the convenience offered by such online companies, don't be surprised when many horrible things happen to you!

      What convenience? The convenience to have to use their inferior-to-my-desktop-app editor, in a browser I wouldn't normally use, with security settings I wouldn't normally use, continigent on my network connection staying up?

      That sounds much better than downloading a file, running the app I decided I wanted to use and learned the quirks of, and being able to put my computer to sleep, move it to a coffee shop and resume. Oh, and allowing my OS to protect my computer like I told it to.

      --
      Your ad here. Ask me how!
    5. Re:HTML5 Features by FuckingNickName · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm willing to bet that within a couple of years, Office will be just as "online" and "in the cloud" as Google docs is.

      You could just substitute research for "betting" and observe what MS is actually doing with their next release: building a limited online version of Office, but selling the usual feature-complete local tools which take advantage of the speed, reliability, connectivity and UI of a native app.

      It would be great to just give users a laptop and a web browser without having to install Office.

      Why not spend the time installing Office, rather than a browser, so they can actually get work done? Seriously, a reason to use Google Docs over Office is that it's harder to install Office than a web browser?

      I find Office much easier to deploy than Firefox, because Microsoft actually thinks about enterprise deployment in their installer. I find Office easier to use than Google Docs, because it provides a familiar native UI.

    6. Re:HTML5 Features by FuckingNickName · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Do you understand how much money [Microsoft] Office is to license?

      Almost nothing, relative to the cost of the employee sitting at the workstation. Productivity is far more important than base licence cost.

      Do you have any idea how many exploits are in the Office suite alone?

      Almost none, relevant to a well configured Office install. And none recent are as bad as the one big risk that is having your plaintext on an anonymous server accessible to various foreign corporations and governments.

      Well, at least Google's never been penetrated and experienced information leakages, and they're responsible with full disclosure of vulnerabilities, right?

  2. Re:Still sounds shittier than OpenOffice.org. by dingen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  3. Re:JavaScript by Vahokif · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What's the point of using an interpreted language when you could compile to, download and execute bytecode much more efficiently?

  4. No offline capabilities.... by ducomputergeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  5. Re:JavaScript by Vahokif · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What are you talking about? It'd still be in the browser, just bytecode instead of JavaScript.

  6. Re:The emperor has no clothes: the apps are poor by FooHentai · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.