Buzzword!

ER was just writing/telling about “Buzzword.” It seems awesome.

 

http://www.virtub.com/

 

From OReilly Radar:

 

The First Real Web-Based Word Processor

 

“This is a REALLY sweet word processor. It's got amazing typography, pagination, resizing and reflowing, all in Flash (and Apollo, for offline use.) Unlike Google Docs, this isn't a lightweight word processor. It may well just be the slickest word processor I've seen anywhere”

 

 

From The Virtual Ubiquity Blog:

 

            What Apollo Means to Buzzword

Dual Citizenship

But Apollo also gives us more. Delivered in a browser, even the best web 2.0 applications are, well, web apps. They visit the desktop, like foreigners, with the browser as an escort and an interpreter. These web apps are constrained by what the browser allows them to see and do.

To be sure, what distinguishes web 2.0 apps like Buzzword from their forebears is the creative use of increasingly rich functionality squeezed out of browsers. For Buzzword, the Flash platform allows us to deliver functionality in a browser that would have been unthinkable only a couple years ago.

But visiting the desktop via browser is like having a visa with some travel restrictions. Deploying Buzzword in Apollo gives us full citizenship on the desktop. This includes things like full file system access, including dragging and dropping files between Buzzword and your local file system. It also will include system tray notification, and more robust clipboard and keyboard control - all of which make the word-processing experience even more personal and engaging.

Of course, browsers can be configured to emulate some of this desktop experience but these things come naturally with Apollo, allowing us to behave like a native citizen on the desktop.

Virtual Document Ubiquity

As Apollo offers dual citizenship, it blurs the line between the desktop and the web. Perhaps Apollo’s biggest value is that it will enable access to your documents and your writing environment whether or not you’re connected to the Internet.

This means that you get virtual document ubiquity: your documents are available on-line from any computer, and they can also be available to you when you’re off-line. And the transition will be seamless - you won’t have to spend time managing your files and their various locations.

This is obviously important: although you can count on connectivity most of the time, it’s never there all of time, and word processing needs to be reliably available. In our demo travels, we find ourselves without access to internet more than we’d anticipated. It’s often the case that even though we’re in a building with wireless, we don’t often have the login information to join the network. Of course, we also want people to be able to use Buzzword on planes, trains and automobiles.