Real word processing on the web
Computer applications are slowly finding their way online, but are they actually useful yet?
There is a bit of a buzz about Buzzword, the slick new online word processor built in Adobe Flash. It's so slick, in fact, that Adobe has just bought Virtual Ubiquity, the company behind it, while it's still in beta.
If you've used the word processor in Google Docs, you should find Buzzword impressive. Google Docs is clunky, hard to use, and looks awful; Buzzword is smooth as silk, has a much nicer user interface, and the results look as good as Microsoft Word, if not better.
Indeed, if you maximise Buzzword and go into Full Screen mode (hit F11 in Windows), nobody would suspect it was an online application running in a browser.
Obviously it has far fewer functions than a full desktop word processor such as Word. However, it offers a choice of fonts in sizes from 8pt to 72pt; you can insert lists, tables and images; and it spell-checks (without autocorrection) as you type. Buzzword also supports headers and endnotes, notes and pagination. If you move or resize a picture, text flows around it, though it can't do columns, yet.
More features are being added, but I reckon you could already write a decent term paper in Buzzword, as long as it's for one of the softer subjects such as English or history. (I couldn't find a way to enter equations, or to do a word-count.)
Buzzword features a somewhat novel menu system. The toolbars are stacked on the top right of the screen, and when you click on the one you want — Paragraph, List, Image etc — Buzzword fires it across the screen. If you need to go back to an earlier toolbar, it's now stacked on the left, so you have to fire it off to the right. It's cute for 10 minutes, then gets annoying.
But the really big problem with Buzzword is that it's probably not much use for most people. If you can do all your word processing online in Buzzword, and then print things out from Buzzword, it works pretty well.
You could also do some word processing in Buzzword, save documents to your hard drive in .doc or .rtf format, then load them into Word or whatever.
But don't expect to be able to "round trip" documents between Word and Buzzword, because it just can't handle a great many of Word's features. If you upload a Word document, your letterheads and comments are ignored, double columns become single columns, Word's fonts are translated into the nearest thing Buzzword can manage, justified text comes out unjustified, your pagination goes out of the window, and so on. It's a one-way trip to somewhere not very nice.
The solution is to create a version of Buzzword that runs in a Flash player on the desktop, so you can use it all the time. Adobe is now developing a player called AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), and Buzzword could be one of the first apps. When that arrives, it could actually be useful.
Jack Schofield
Monday October 8 2007
Guardian Unlimited
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
Computer applications are slowly finding their way online, but are they actually useful yet?
There is a bit of a buzz about Buzzword, the slick new online word processor built in Adobe Flash. It's so slick, in fact, that Adobe has just bought Virtual Ubiquity, the company behind it, while it's still in beta.
If you've used the word processor in Google Docs, you should find Buzzword impressive. Google Docs is clunky, hard to use, and looks awful; Buzzword is smooth as silk, has a much nicer user interface, and the results look as good as Microsoft Word, if not better.
Indeed, if you maximise Buzzword and go into Full Screen mode (hit F11 in Windows), nobody would suspect it was an online application running in a browser.
Obviously it has far fewer functions than a full desktop word processor such as Word. However, it offers a choice of fonts in sizes from 8pt to 72pt; you can insert lists, tables and images; and it spell-checks (without autocorrection) as you type. Buzzword also supports headers and endnotes, notes and pagination. If you move or resize a picture, text flows around it, though it can't do columns, yet.
More features are being added, but I reckon you could already write a decent term paper in Buzzword, as long as it's for one of the softer subjects such as English or history. (I couldn't find a way to enter equations, or to do a word-count.)
Buzzword features a somewhat novel menu system. The toolbars are stacked on the top right of the screen, and when you click on the one you want — Paragraph, List, Image etc — Buzzword fires it across the screen. If you need to go back to an earlier toolbar, it's now stacked on the left, so you have to fire it off to the right. It's cute for 10 minutes, then gets annoying.
But the really big problem with Buzzword is that it's probably not much use for most people. If you can do all your word processing online in Buzzword, and then print things out from Buzzword, it works pretty well.
You could also do some word processing in Buzzword, save documents to your hard drive in .doc or .rtf format, then load them into Word or whatever.
But don't expect to be able to "round trip" documents between Word and Buzzword, because it just can't handle a great many of Word's features. If you upload a Word document, your letterheads and comments are ignored, double columns become single columns, Word's fonts are translated into the nearest thing Buzzword can manage, justified text comes out unjustified, your pagination goes out of the window, and so on. It's a one-way trip to somewhere not very nice.
The solution is to create a version of Buzzword that runs in a Flash player on the desktop, so you can use it all the time. Adobe is now developing a player called AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), and Buzzword could be one of the first apps. When that arrives, it could actually be useful.
Jack Schofield
Monday October 8 2007
Guardian Unlimited
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
