So
I’ve been trying ajaxWrite and gOffice over the past few hours, and
both seem like pretty decent services. As you can probably tell from
their names, ajaxWrite is an online word-processor and gOffice is an
online office suite, in which their word-processing component figures
rather prominently. I wasn’t able to sign up for the third company
that I wanted to review, Writely.com, as they’ve suspended
registrations for the time being (transferring code to its new home
at Google, according to the notice), so this is unfortunately not
going to be a full review of all three proponents.
ajaxWrite
is pretty much what you’d expect from an online word-processor; it’s
got a tiny footprint (400kb to download), is dead-simple to use, and
does all the essentials that you’d otherwise expect from its
desktop-based competition (i.e., save, print and do some basic
formatting). It’s essentially WordPad, but online and with a tabbed
interface. That, to me, is the big issue though: CEO Michael
Robertson isn’t shy about his goals with this product. He wants to
replace M$ Word. For
most people, that means spell-checks and auto-formatting,
version-histories and email-integration, etc., etc. Some of these
things, i.e., spell-check and email-integration, are definite
must-haves and I don’t doubt that they’re already on the way to
building all the relevant modules, while the others are value-adds
that will come into play in a more enterprise-focused kind of
application. Silver Office’s gOffice, on the other hand, is slightly
more modest with their ambitions: they don’t seek to replace Office
so much as complement it.
At
the moment though, there’s nothing hugely compelling about either
ajaxWrite or gOffice, other than the fact that it’s a basic
alternative for people who don’t already have Word. In other words,
if I already had Word and the rest of Office installed on my machine,
there’s really no reason for me to switch over. These web-based
applications aren’t necessarily faster to load, because you do need
to go to the website and download the javascript every time you want
to use it (it does cache the code though, so the point of entry
becomes a two-step dance that involves opening up Firefox and
locating the appropriate bookmark). And resource-wise, it does
piggy-back on the Firefox run-time, so you’re not necessarily saving
a huge amount of RAM by using a web-based word processor instead of a
desktop-based one (especially if your copy of Firefox leaks).
Off-hand
though, it’s clear to me that ajaxWrite is the more streamlined of
the two word-processors I tried, not only for the way its interface
is designed, but also because it isn’t tied to a particular format
the way gOffice is (it only exports to PDFs, which it relies on for
its printing functionality; computers without Acrobat Reader are,
hence, out of luck). On the other hand, gOffice has already debuted
an alpha version of its Excel clone, which seems to be working
relatively well but doesn’t yet have any of the chart-generation
functions that we all know and love.
If you’re thinking of trying out either of these apps, there are a number of things you should be aware of:
Saving a document in ajaxWrite requires that you download the file you created to some place in your desktop. In gOffice,
meanwhile, your documents are saved remotely on their servers. The only
way I could find to save it to your computer was by viewing the
finished document as a PDF, and then saving the text through Acrobat
Reader. The ajaxWrite solution makes a bit more sense if you’re looking
for conceptual-compatibility with the desktop paradigm, but it makes
incremental saving a bit of a bitch (you have to download the file over
and over again if you’re paranoid about losing changes). gOffice’s
solution makes quick-saving easier, but when you actually want to save
a local copy of the file, it feels a bit unpolished.
Opening a document in
ajaxWrite involves uploading it to their server for processing. This is
fine if you’re just working with text, but don’t expect to be able to
write the manuscript for your next novel in this manner, as it is
likely to cause headaches. It’s in this situation, primarily, that
gOffice’s approach of remote-saving starts to make sense, because files
are opened pretty much instantaneously. ajaxWrite’s
your-data-is-yours-alone approach is certainly nice and all, but you do
lose a large part of the flexibility that makes online word-processing
appealing for certain types of people, i.e., being able to access your
work files no matter where you are in the world. I think the proper way
to approach this problem would simply be to let your users choose how
they want their files to be saved. The solution that makes the most
sense to me is to automatically save their stuff remotely, and then ask
them if they want to download a copy for their local machine as well.
Printing a document from
ajaxWrite has the rather annoying consequence of having the URL appear
on the top right-hand side of each page, as well as a time and date at
the bottom (it uses the Firefox’s Printing component, and it can be
pretty annoying if you forget to tweak the settings to turn all those
extraneous headers and footers off). gOffice’s output, meanwhile, is
quite acceptable without any tweaking, since it uses Acrobat Reader’s
Printing component to get the job done.
Overall,
both of these applications look quite promising. Whether or not moving
to an online word-processor turns out to be the killer solution for you
will depend greatly on your own situation and workflow, I think.
Because I haven’t tried the most mature of these offerings, Writely,
I’m having a hard time coming up a very accurate assessment of just how
effective these online apps can be. I do know that a few of my issues
with either ajaxWrite and gOffice have already been solved by the folks
at Writely, so I guess I’ll continue this review once I’ve had a chance
to sign up for their service.