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Thursday, September 22, 2005

Writely Update

I was wrong, writely does support hyperlinks and spell checking (as demonstrated by this posting), and they responded to my feedback very quickly. So it really is a very nice tool for writing blog posts. My experience as a very small sample usability test indicates perhaps that the UI design and help text should be tweaked a little to make the available features more obvious.

It so happens I am co-writing a paper with someone outside my company right now, so I think I will test to see if collaborative writing works. However he is on a Mac, so perhaps he will run into the Safari problem.

posted by Eamonn | 11:39 AM | 0 comments

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Writely

I remember back in the dot-com boom days one of the new-new things were ASPs, application service providers, who provide hosted applications to replace enterpise and desktop applications. In fact I was one of the team on such a venture developing a collaboration tool for small businesses.

When brainstorming over what applications were good candidates for web hosting, I remember we explicitly rejected word processing as not being suitable. But that was before AJAX.

Now, I am posting this entry using a service called Writely, which is a web-hosted word processor that allows multiple people to collaborate on writing a document. I can do all the usual styling like bold, italic, underline, different fonts, and different sizes. It is a well executed application, though still missing a lot of features like, as far as I can tell, spell checking and hyperlinks.

posted by Eamonn | 11:32 PM | 0 comments