Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

5 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. "

  2. 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.