Google Office Beta

I only claim prescience to my manager though :)

Good thing he doesn't read this.

There it is: Writely and Google spreadsheets have come together , and are now out in the same theme with an integrated inbox and everything. It's plugged in to my Google mail and calendar, the theme is the same for all the apps (yea! I was not fond of the Writely color scheme to be honest). And some of my nits have already been picked.

In my last post and the comment stream that followed it, we talked about some of the things we liked and disliked about Writely (now apparently called 'Docs'). To summarize with updates:

• HTML Generation not great: New version looks to be the same there. It is not that it is utterly non-standard, just that if could be better, and to be honest I expect someone who really 'gets it' about web standards like Google does to be totally on board with the need to generate good HTML. I predict it will get better.
  
• 'vertical squishiness' : The industry standard technical term used to describe the way docs.google.com displays the paragraph space implied by the HTML markup sequence <p>thing</p><p>New thing</p>: still squished. I hope this gets more WYSIWYG in future. Even the 'Preview' feature is vertically-squishy-challenged.
  
• Spell checker is not as obvious about the way it highlights misspellings : Fixed! Yea! Looks like Gmail now, which in my book is a 'Good Thing' (TM)
• Theme now the same (noted already): yes: I like blue. What can I say?
  
• Style widget seems better: To be honest, it may be that I just really figure out how it works when I was writing this post with writely/docs today.
• Speed: Alysia commented that she didn't like how slow Writely had been when she tried it: I do not know when that was. today, on the first day of it's new Google-office-ness, performance seems fine to me. It is especially fast from my house on the Mac. Does that mean the speed is related to having a computer that can execute AJAX code quickly? I wonder: If so, all these dual core AMD and Intel chips are going to get a nice workout.
  
• Looks like a revision bar over on the right side the area of the text now indicates where I was last working in when I leave the document to look at something else, or manually hack at the HTML: pretty nifty.
  

All the things I liked are still there: 'Revisions' still being very very cool, as is 'Collaborate'. In fact, I fat-fingered this entire entry, and deleted the whole thing, and revisions brought it back right where I was before my brain disconnected from my fingers. Cool.

It still says 'Beta' on the masthead: but then when was the last time any of these things went GA? It is sort of like the open source projects that asymptotically approach the 1.0 release. The idea is that software is never really done. Whatever. As long as it keeps getting better, it doesn't matter to me what they call it. Its usable now. And handy.

I have this and two other weblog entries under way from here on my Linux system and with my Firefox browser. I am writing then more or less at the same time, bouncing between them as sentences form in my head, and when I go home tonight everything will be there, and editable from my Mac (Update: Yep. Here it all is, just like I left it), so I can unwind all the goofy things that happen when you write two or three different posts about completely different things at the same time.

The only bad thing: talk.bmc.com is not one of the platforms writely/docs can publish directly to. Yet.