Google's Writely

Google has publically launched Writely, a free online word processing application. It writes PDFs, will publish directly to your blog, has collaboration tools including subscribing to an RSS feed of a document), automatic off-site backups and more.

It is, of course, an impressive application, but I’m not sure if it will usurp Word as the de facto word processor. It seems everyone already has a copy of Microsoft’s offering. Writely may not take off, but perhaps it will have the positive effect of inspiring some improvements in the software we already have. I mean, it’s not like Microsoft doesn’t like to update their products. This may just mean that there are actually some relevant additions to the next release.

Though I did, in fact, use Writely to create this post and it worked fairly well. It didn’t include the title of the document, but it warms you that this feature may not be supported. It also used breaks instead of the paragraph tag for the html, so that was a bit unusual. Since I typically use paragraphs, I edited the post’s HTML after the fact, but I suspect most people won’t notice or care. Not to mention this just came out – a few improvements are probably already on the way.

I didn’t expect to be switching over to a new method of posting to this site, but it was worth a test. Now that I have made that test, I know for certain that I will be sticking to my trusty WordPress administration panel.

Aug 20, 2006 | Categories:Blog, Google, Tech, Wordpress | 1 Comment »