Google’s Writely
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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