Blog . Jiboneus

I’ve been using Writely for awhile now. It is really a great web application. First of, Wrilely is a web base word processing tool. Think of it as Microsoft Word online. They manage to make a really fast and very responsive word processor with claver use of AJAX.

The interface and its look and feel is not far from your typical word processor. Color, font, left align, right align, center align, justified, it truly feels as if you are typing on a word processor and not on a web page. It also has a on the fly spell checker, the read screwy line like Microsoft Words, and it suggest words to you to, again just like a word processor would. I can stress enough of how Writely feels like a word processor.

It is also fast and responsive unlike the online version JAVA base applate word processor by ThinkFree. It’s a good effort nevertheless.

Why make a word processor online? Well there is a pretty damn good reason for that, collaboration. With Writely you can collaborate your work in real time. While you were editing, typing on your word document, you could also see other people who you had invite to collaborate on you document editing the same document. When someone save something it is save as an incremental version. You then can look at the document and see which part was added by whom.

I’m a final year degree student, I wish I had known about Writely back when I was a freshman. It is the ideal tool to work on assignment papers with your group. Instead of passing around .doc file through e-mail which you will loose track of who edit what, you can have all your group member collaborate on the paper on Writely. The document wont suddenly vanish, unless of cause if Writely forget to pay their hosting bills, which I doubt it. They are currently offering the service free but there are premium accounts ( I don’t know if they have implement it or not, I could not find the upgrade account link).

There is also one more thing. Writely allows you to upload HTML files, plain text (.txt), Microsoft Word file (.doc), Rich Text Format files (.rtf) OpenOffice files (.odt, .sxw), and also upload image for you to use on your document. Writely then allows you to save your document as, or export it to Word file (.doc) OpenOffice file, Rich Text fromat file, PDF file and also as a zip.

Check out Writely at writely.com.

p/s: You could also check out WriteBoard from 37signals which is another web base collaborative writing web application. A simpler version there is no need for registration, doesn’t have the look and feel of a word processor, but it did the job of collaborating pretty well. It is also 100% free.

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