DgtizeD

This post was written using the writely word processor (http://docs.google.com). Basically I wanted to do a test post using the new publish system to see if writely would make a suitable replacement to the textile backed text editor in Typo. So this is going to be a feature testing post.

Features I like thus far:

• Revisions are pretty cool. This document auto saves every couple of seconds, and generates a new revision for every one of these saves. The advantage to this is I can later go back and rollback to any prior revision if I mess something up.
• Drag and drop image placement from a browser interface. I don’t think I need to comment on this other then that it exists and is thus awesome.
• The ability to publish to this document to a blog from the word processor interface.
• Collaborate is cool, though I don’t know as I have as much use for this. If I there was a way to collaborate and use Latex instead that would be cool. Speaking of which, if you can embed pictures in these documents, then it should be possible to embed math images. I wonder if it would be possible to get MediaWiki style equation editing? That would definitely be very nice. I guess MathML probably works.
  

Problems thus far:

• While save to word, pdf, open document, and rtf are all cool, it would be really nice if I could preview this document at a sensible column width so that page breaks, page count, and other standard “what is the format of this document on a physical medium” type of things worked.
• Obviously the font problem is by virtue of the list that browsers guarantee. Can’t something be done about this though? Why is there no pleasant format for automatically installing cross platform fonts from the web?
  

Features from word that are missing:

• Grammar checking — as much as it may or may not suck it does catch some things and is therefor kind of nice. If you can spell checking in the browser it ought to be possible to do grammar checking.
• Auto-spell checking every time it auto saves instead of every time I hit recheck.

I think this would be even more awesome if say open office allowed one to edit documents and save each revision in this document list. I like the idea of a central document repository with versioning. I just wish I had a better editor then the web interface. The web interface is very impressive given that it is a web interface, but it remains a web interface.

The real question in my mind then, is when the presentation/powerpoint replacement is coming? Or are they too worried about the storage space necessary for that?

Update:
Well the post worked, however tags and extended post are clearly not working. That is to be expected, tags aren’t too much of a problem, but perhaps I can hack the extended content to work by looking for Google page breaks when posts are submitted. I could probably do something with the tags issue at the same time.

Would that Google had a web api for this app like the one it has for calendar!