Writely Does It Right
// October 18th, 2005 // Technology Bits
I recently discovered a web based document or content editor called Writely. Matt at Bork Web tried it out and gave me his opinions on it so I decided to take a stab at it as well. It is a Web 2.0 application that intends to replace Microsoft Word. I consder this similar to the way Gmail completely changed what we expect out of web-based email clients. Now I want all content editing to work just like Writely. I’m actually writing this blog post in Writely, since they have the ability to post content directly to a blog using the standard blogging APIs. If this works out, it will certainly replace all reliance I had on Ecto.
OK, for testing purposes I’m going to try a couple text styles out just to see how they post through.
List:
- element 1
- element 2
- element 3
Some boldness and a bit of italics, followed by a touch of underlined text.
I also placed the image in the top left with the WYSIWYG too.
web20, web 2.0, web 20, writely, web applications, word processor, word processing, word, microsoft, microsoft word, outlook, gmail, google
2012 
OK, a couple stumbles, but good anyway. This is what I sent along to Writely:
With the initial post, it sent through a pile of line breaks that weren’t there in the original document. I then changed one line, and did an update of the post. At this point it fixed the breaks, but dropped the alignment of an image so text stopped wrapping around it. I then went in to check if I had for sure told the image to left align. I had, so I went back and hit update again. At this point everything looks beautiful.
Oh, I also intentionally misspelled consider as consder and there doesn’t appear to be a spell checker…
Actually, there is a spell checker. You need to actually click the icon for it to work though. (its the 4th icon from on the left) The spell checker does the whole MS Word squiggly underline, too :)
Currently supported browsers for Writely:
FireFox: 1.0.3 or higher, but NOT 1.5b1
Internet Explorer: 6.0 or higher
Mozilla: 1.4 or higher, but NOT 1.4.1
I guess that leaves Opera zealots like me out of luck for now. The funny thing is, it lets me create an account, log in and choose a name for a new document. Then the actual editor half loads before I’m sent to the browser compatability page.
Yeah, experienced the same difficulty with Safari. Unfortunately developing cross browser supported AJAX sites is nearly impossible. I’ve suffered through this a bit with some stuff I’ve been working on. I assume with critical mass/adoption, we’ll see an expansion of supported browsers.
[...] Writely does this very well as relates to Microsoft Word. For three months now I have used Writely exclusively for my word processing needs. I no longer have any use for Word. [...]
[...] I was excited about Writely early on, and I’m even more excited to see how it evolves with the power of Google behind it. Which piece will they tackle next? They have GMail, Calendar appears to be around the corner, this gives them word processing… I’d like a spreadsheet application, maybe iRows? Or how about an presentation solution, maybe build an application on top of S5? That would only leave Access and Visio without competition in this space. [...]