There’s certainly no shortage of online word processors. Google Documents and Zoho Writer probably lead the pack these days in terms of widespread adoption, but there are other choices too. One of these is Buzzword – a flash-based online word processor that’s owned by Adobe these days. You do need to put up with a first-time download delay while the Flash application ends up on your machine, but in return, you end up with a much more attractive working environment than pure HTML editors can deliver, no matter how many fancy javascript tricks they use.
On the feature level, Buzzword offers a good selection of what you’ll need to write and share documents online. There’s a document-management front end that allows renaming, deleting, sharing, and so on, as well as creating new documents. Once you’re editing, you get a nice-looking canvas driven by a short set of menus and some sliding toolbars. As you’d expect, you can adjust fonts and paragraphs, insert images and tables, and otherwise customize the look of your document. The image and table tools are especially strong, making Buzzword a better choice for modestly complex documents than some of its competitors. As you work, the document is automatically saved to the company’s servers.
Collaborative features include comment notes with datestamping as well as the ability to share a document with others. You can select on a document-by-document basis whether other users should be able to edit, read and comment, or just read. There’s no direct equivalent of the Google Documents “publish” feature, though: only Buzzword users can get to your document, unless you choose to save a copy to your local hard drive (native, Microsoft Word, RTF, or HTML formats, as well as plain text, are available).
The application is quite responsive; it kept up with my typing easily, and manages real-time spellchecking as well. When two users are editing the document at the same time, they’ll automatically see each other’s changes as soon as they’re saved. There’s some ability to roll back changes to an earlier version, though not every version is archived forever.
Other minor annoyances include only a small selection of fonts (and nonstandard ones at that), as well as a scrollbar that behaves in subtly different ways from other browser scrollbars (at least in Firefox on my Mac). But if you’re concerned with getting an online word processor that is kind to the eyes, as well as functional, Buzzword is worth a visit. It’s in beta right now (they call it “preview”) but signups are free and simple, without even an email confirmation to go through.
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