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Google’s Writely

August 21st, 2006

Spent a while playing around with Google’s Writely, a web-residing word processor. It’s pretty decent, kind of reminds one of a basic version of Word circa 5.1 on a Macintosh SE30. So it’s decidedly stripped down and not really all that great as a desktop replacement, but it lays the foundation for future versions to come.

It has the basic tools such as font formatting, aligning, inserting tables, and changing colors. Some of the more notable features are its ability to save into HTML, Word, OpenOffice, and PDF. The formats are all handled so the output formats save directly to your desktop. You don’t really need to worry about saving your file online as it regularly auto-saves.

Slick as Writely is, I’m a bit weary of the promise of doing traditionally desktop computing tasks online. I’m not really worried about privacy. What bugs me is that currently, there is a trade off for in order to use Google Writely, Spreadsheet, or Calendar, you give up power user features. Plus, I’m not 100% online all the time. I like to have some ownership of my media. I can make the conceptual leap to have pretty much everything in digital form. The next leap to having everything residing on someone else’s server and not my own hard drive is the thing I’m not ready for.

However, I can see a day in the future where most tasks are performed online. Already, I’ve been posting crap on this blog and organizing my bottle cap collection 90% online. The only place where offline processing comes into play is for the image processing. So the future will likely include tasks such as word processing and other office-esque tasks. That day is not today, however. It’s some years off at this rate for technology to be fully capable… and then give another few years for the mainstream masses to get used to the idea.

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  • Actually, wrt to image processing. I'm doing a lot of my quick image processing online now too. Photoshop takes to long to boot up sometimes, or if I'm in Windows (using bootcamp) where I don't have PShop, sometimes I just need an image resized or cropped. Enter my mainstays: pxn8.com or snipshot.com

    Give 'em a whirl. They won't replace Photoshop, but they are definitely useful for certain tasks.
  • Hmmm, seems interesting, although as I played around with pxn8.com and their crop tool, I get "Software error". Finally got it to work. Feels a bit rough around the edges.

    Snipshot feels a bit more intuitive and right to me. I get it right off the bat. I like the dragging around area that kind of simulates a desktop.

    I guess it's kind of a balance between finding the tools that most people would use 90% of the time and not offering enough. Seems like Apple kind of covers this realm for me with iPhoto.
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