DISQUS

paul · 3 years ago

How about Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional costing $499.00 now that everybody can create PDF files for FREE?

Robert Scoble · 3 years ago

Yikes. But that's aimed more at professional publishers who have magazines, brochures, and such, and have paid a lot to develop that content and want to get it online.

hoodia · 3 years ago

Google trying to capture everything, penetrating in every possible sphere of web and document processing, likewise microsoft did an attempt time ago, but was stopped, who is going to stop Google now from taking over the computer world? Everything in terms of evolution seems to be right, but the perspectives of being summond to one Company -logo, is not so fairy. ALthough there is a flows in the new writter, but with the massive financial backing development team will solve the problem on a short notice. Hoodia Gordonii Plus.

Evan · 3 years ago

Qumana is what I think I'll be using myself.

Mian Fahim ul Haq · 3 years ago

Yes Scoble I agree with you on offline editors. We don't have 24-hours internet connectivity everywhere in the world. A few days back you talked about Microsoft messenger becoming a resource eater. I think same is the case with Google when it comes to Internet. I am in Pakistan and here we usually have 56K dialups. So most of us here have disabled gmail chat because it slows everything. Probably they have forgotten that people use slow internet connections in the world. (www.google.com.pk still has Google groups in its main page. So they have forgotten us somewhat :P at least) Same goes for yahoo. A yahoo email takes 1-2 minutes to open :(.

Obviously everyone cannot use online calendars etc. as well.

There should be a decent compromise between what should go online and what can be done offline.

By the way, you need to give transcripts on PodTech’s site. Some of us might want to read instead of downloading audio/video.

Bharath Kumar · 3 years ago

For blogging writely is no match for Live writer.

Somu · 3 years ago

Writely saves the content automatically every 10 sec. And hence losing the content would be minimal.

But I do understand that when you are used to some software, and if you really like it, you don't really find the need to switch to another one.

paul · 3 years ago

.writely.com/Doc.aspx?id

ASP.Net Woot!

Zoli Erdos · 3 years ago

Robert, as for the separate icon in the taskbar, I've seen the future ... from Zoho. It's coming soon, keep your eyes open :-)

Ross Hill · 3 years ago

If you think about how much of your life is already online adding another aspect to the mix probably isn't that damaging. If my internet ever goes down I go out and get some sunshine for the rest of the day because I know I probably won't be as productive offline.

Robert Scoble · 3 years ago

Ross: the problem is that sometimes when the wireless disappears it causes the browsers to crash or refresh and then all your work is gonno.

Robert Scoble · 3 years ago

Zoli you know how to tease a geek, don't you?

Deepak · 3 years ago

I would say that I am online, or capable of being online 80-90% of my waking hours. At work I am online all the time. For many tasks, I don't see why I wouldn't use something like writely. I actually do this a bit with writeboards from 37signals. If I have connectivity, I tend to type in notes directly into a writeboard. If not, I use use a text editor and then upload when I am online again. Usually works.

IMO, for collaborative work, Writely and the likes beat offline word processors. While the time hasn't come yet, I can see the Writely's of the world becoming more widely used over the next decade.

Michael · 3 years ago

"how many of us have stupidly clicked on something to watch our blog post disappear as the browser refreshes"

You should try this on Writely; that's one problem they've solved well.

Lee · 3 years ago

Writely is fine for light writing like blog entries. Serious word processing requires more features: table of contents, indexing, real styles, headers and footers, columns and compatibility with Track Changes to name just a few.

Moishe · 3 years ago

I've been using Writely at work for about a month now. At first I had a little bit of trepidation about it (to put it in context, I spend 90% of my work time in emacs), but it's great. Turns out, having lots of people read and comment on your docs as you create them is a pretty big deal; also, for stuff like "to do lists" it's a really easy & quick way to keep them up to date. For instance: we don't email status lists around and get huge email threads of status; everyone concerned just edits things in our status doc as they see fit.

Imagine a real-time, WYSIWYG Wiki. Writely's strength isn't -- in my mind -- as a word processor per se. Think about it more as a tool that lets you create 50-page documents with the same level of collaboration with which you'd write lists on physical whiteboards.

And, yeah, the autosave feature is pretty solid too :)

Zoli Erdos · 3 years ago

Robert, I sure do .. would you like a preview? :-)

Adam S · 3 years ago

Google/Writely/Google spreadsheets autosave as you type every few seconds.

Leopard's version of Safari (and in time, other browsers who copy this feature) warn you before closing a browser window or refreshing a page if you've entered text into a form.

That sounds like a nice amount of warning to me. I vote for online - work and home no longer need "syncing."

Brewster · 3 years ago

"How about Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional costing $499.00 now that everybody can create PDF files for FREE?"

Everybody except Office 2007, since threatened to sue Microsoft if it did (built-in). ;-)