My Uninstalled Life

The first thing you notice about Zoho Writer is that you have to login to use it (although, you can login as a demo user to test it out). The reason is probably because when you save the documents, they are saved to their server and you have all your documents in the table to the left. Luckily, you can also export your documents. It takes about 5 seconds to load and another 5-10 seconds to load up the default document – probably because it’s huge.

Zoho Writer is packed with feature as any normal word processor. It has the possibility to create tables (including the features Insert row after, Insert column before etc)and you can style them in whatever style you want. You can add pictures. Just the fact that you can right-click an object and get options for that object is impressive. Among other interesting features are that you can use it for collaborative work and e-mail/pusblish them directly from Zoho Writer and you even got spell checking.

Zoho Writer is definitly on it’s way to successfully replace my desktop word processor. I’m just missing a way to execute the application directly from my desktop and sometimes, it feels a little bit slow.

Ajaxwrite loads quite quickly (5 seconds) and you get a nice resizeable window with tabbed editing. You cannot put a shortcut on your desktop. For some reason, Ajaxwrite thinks you don’t have JavaScript enabled when you start it that way.

Ajaxwrite is very simple to use and fast. You have the ability to create tables (but not the format of the borders). There are choices in the menus to insert images and objects but they are greyed out – don’t know if this is a known problem or if the feature is simply not implemented yet. One good feature is that you can decide which format to save the file in (Microsoft Word, Open Office, RTF, text and even PDF).

Here are some screenshots:

Writely has been aquired by Google. I guess we can expect Writely to be integrated with the rest of the “Google platform” with the possibility to save your documents online within Gmail. Since registration is closed for now until it’s moved to Google systems, I cannot try it out. If someone has, please contact me!

In the meantime, here’s a screenshot or why not take their tour.