Trying Writely

After Jon blogged about Writely , I thought that I'd give it a whirl, and I'm pretty impressed. Writely is a completely web based word processor. You can edit and save all of your documents online. You can tag them, star them, and archive them when you're done. You can also upload and export the document and save it to your computer. When I first tried it out, they only supported MS Word documents, but as of now, they also support OpenDocument and OOo SXW. I really like that, since most online services opt out of OpenSource and go for the most commonly used standard, even if it's proprietary.

With Writely, you can also share a document and allow a group of people to edit and make changes, which can be useful in certain situations.

Also, a nice feature is the print feature. Normally when you want to print something in a web browser, you click on a print button and it opens up another small window and you usually print that window. In this, however, you click the print button and it immediately opens up the printer dialog box. It's not necessarily better, but it's a nice improvement.

But one of my favorite features is the blog feature. You can post to most common blog services, including Blogger, LiveJournal, and any other blog that supports the xmlrpc standard (another innovation, brought to you by open standards). I like the Writely interface much better than Blogger's (take a look at the screenshot). I think I'll try using it for a while.

One nice thing is that I can write extra articles and save them incase the likely event happens that I get lazy and want to update my blog. Just click'n blog from Writely, problem solved.

More to come!