Google "Office" Released 394
pumpknhd writes "Looks like Google has finally integrated Writely and spreadsheets into Google "Docs & Spreadsheets". Writely.com now redirects to this new location. The design has also changed to match the look of other Google services." The more "applications" I try forcing into a tabbed web MDI model under a Mac, the more clumsy it gets. They aren't in my Dock, they can't be apple-tabbed through. Issues like this really frustrate me as I find myself wanting to use more web2.0 ajaxy fancy pants programs.
PicasaWeb? (Score:2, Interesting)
MDI browser model (Score:3, Interesting)
API? (Score:4, Interesting)
Dan East
File Storage (Score:5, Interesting)
1. How do I easily upload and organize all my locally saved Word and Excel files?
2. How do I maintain a local copy of all my changes and new files?
3. How safe should I feel about uploading files with sensitive personal info?
Answer these questions, Google, and I'm on board. And, I suspect many other people will be too.
Dashboard Web Clip (Score:4, Interesting)
Ultimate Conspiracy Theory 2006 (Score:5, Interesting)
Late 2007, Vista adoption is still beginning to happen, WGA eats at Microsoft share of OS. People looking for alternatives.
Google buys Ubuntu and rebrands it as a powerfull "plug and play" web platform that interfaces with Google apps and Firefox. Google Box is born.
Google buys Mozilla. Firefox keeps it's brand and keep on expanding its web platform features in FF 3.0 and 4.0 as it adds 3D and OpenGL acceleration.
Late 2009: Microsoft share is dropping quickly at the same time increasing their revenue as pirates are slpit between those paying up, and those going for Google Box.
Late 2011, Google purchases Adobe and makes Flash and a light version of PDF part of their web platform. Google announced mobile web platform: Google Boxmobile.
Windows share has dropped below 50%. This allows Microsoft to innovate and integrate applications in their OS without threats from antitrust and anti-monopoly lawsuits. Spectacularly, with nearly half the share it had before, Microsoft's revenue is higher than ever. Microsoft releases Windows Vienna, amazing advancement in the world of desktop OS and computer-interface technologies.
Microsoft positions Windows Vienna as the desktop os for power users, business users and IT professionals, and phases out Vista and XP.
Google Box positions itself as the casual computer platform for people looking for entertainment, photo management, word/spreadsheet functionality, light games etc.
Re:It's probably limited by AJAX. (Score:3, Interesting)
The best part... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Problems with AJAX (Score:1, Interesting)
b) If someone (friend/relative) wanted to use my computer to go online and check out something, that's fine with me (as long as they don't use IE). If they wanted to install an application, I'd tend to say no.
Re:Neat Tool, What About Adobe? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the areas where Google excels they find themselves only #1 by a small margin, but the breadth of their offerings makes them seem larger then they really are. Because they still have strong competitors it doesn't make them a monopoly so they can use their clout to push their products without the same problems MS has.
Your rights granted by Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Your Rights
Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Google services and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services.
Google reserves the right to syndicate Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services and use that Content in connection with any service offered by Google. Google furthermore reserves the right to refuse to accept, post, display or transmit any Content in its sole discretion. You represent and warrant that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the rights granted herein to any Content submitted.
I have to say that does seem pretty far from evil. Why do I even keep this hat anyway?
If you have multiple computers it is. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're constantly floating between multiple computers, then the ability to just sit down at a browser, type your L/P, and have all your documents presented to you is a real "killer feature." One that might completely outweigh any limitations of importing and exporting.
As people get more computers -- a whole lot of what I'd call 'average people' now have more than one (at least one work computer and another personal computer) -- this becomes more valuable. Plus, you don't have to deal with backups of your work (though you probably still should), and if your computer gets hosed, you can just nuke it or replace the whole thing. Computers become just these modular, interchangable, anonymous frontends to your work, which is all online.
Plus, the ability to collaborate online with others is a nice plus that you can't do very easily with desktop applications; instead of emailing documents back and forth to other people and trying to keep the versions straight, you just put it up on Goffice and let everyone red-line it.
Re:File Storage (Score:4, Interesting)
I am surprised there is so little discussion here about this. Lots of "ooooing and aaaahhing" over "save as pdf" (which is kinda cool) but little about the fact that if you want to use as your main office suite then you need to upload your personal information. It would be really cool if they distributed the program for installation on my own web server.
Very nice in a pinch though and will probably use it, even if in a somewhat limited fashion.
Re:Problems with AJAX (Score:3, Interesting)
Need to make tabs the "base unit" of the UI. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have a bunch of stacked browser windows, everything works peachy on OS X, just like you described. Cmd-Tab cycles through applications, and then Cmd-` goes through the windows. This is because the OS is designed with the idea of a "window" as its most basic unit. Each window is owned by an application and has one task going on in it. This has been the way of things since the MultiFinder in MacOS 6
Unfortunately, since tabs are part of the application and not really handled by the OS, there's no universal command for cycling through them. In some applications (e.g. Adium), you use Command-[left/right arrow]; in other applications (Firefox) it's different. I don't even know if there's a hotkey for cycling through tabs in Safari -- I hope there is, but that I just haven't found it yet.
At any rate, I think tabs are something where the application developers and users latched onto a useful feature, which the operating system UI designers never really counted on.
What needs to happen is that the OS' windowing system itself needs to implement tabbing, instead of leaving it to each application to do differently. Think of the neat stuff you could do -- any window could become a tab in any other window, maybe by just dragging one window's title bar into another. So you could have a Finder tab going inside of a Safari "window," or vice versa. Want to break a tab off into a separate window? You could do that, too. Individual tabs could be independently reduced to the Dock, and expanded back up into their parent windows, or their own, or into different windows.
But the point is that rather than leaving tabbing up to each application to do a little differently, Apple needs to step in and provide a guideline as to what the best practice is, and make it easy to implement universally.
IMO, rather than having the "window" being the base unit of UI design, the tab needs to become that. Today's "window" needs to become a looser concept -- call it a "frame." A frame is just a variable-size, resizable object that holds tabs; if it only has one tab in it, then the tab itself isn't shown and it looks like a window does today. The frame isn't owned by any application; applications instead create tabs in frames. So if an application instance crashes, all of its tabs would close, but any other tabs in the same frame would be unaffected. The menu bar would change contexts as the user switched from one tab to another, rather from one frame/window to another as it does now.
Tabs are a really useful invention, and frankly I think the concept should be broadened. Word processing and many other activities could each benefit from tabbing, and the user would get a coherent and cohesive interface for manipulating and working with tabs, that would save them time and confusion over the current situation. That it would make web applications vastly easier to use would be a very positive side-effect.
Re:LaTeX (Score:4, Interesting)
And of course, no mention of (La)TeX would be compleat w/o suggesting people look at the TeX Showcase:
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase [tug.org]
William
Re:LaTeX (Score:3, Interesting)
LaTeX with an appropriate front-end is no less a word processor than the tools that are marketted as "word processors". Its not WYSIWYG, but for a long time (even after WYSIWYG word processors were available), neither were most word processors.
For those of use who type well and for whom reaching out to grab the mouse breaks the flow, or attempting to go back after writing to apply structure is harder than typing in the structure as you as you go, an appropriate LaTeX environment is often a better word processing environment than MS Word.
For those of us who end up having to maintain regularly updated documents that dozens of different Word users have edited, each taking different routes to produce similar (but usually not as consistent as intended) appearance, LaTeX or a similar environment that is markup-based rather than focussed around WYSIWYG editing.
True, though MS Word is the WYSIWYG program most commonly used, you can compare it MS Word and conclude you've done a comparison to the most important WYSIWYG program that people use.
LaTeX is, IME (and I've been using Microsoft Word since the Windows 3.11 days, used a number of other WYSIWYG word processors and layout/DTP programs for years, and LaTeX for less than a year), no harder to learn and become proficient beyond a fairly basic level with than many WYSIWYG programs. The instant feedback of WYSIWYG is a big boost for basic familiarity, though, sure.
Perhaps, though I'm not sure about "most" or what tasks you think of as "normal".
That may be certainly the case, OTOH, the price tag of InDesign means that in most environments, "most users" aren't going to have InDesign available. Of course, a hybrid product, well-designed, can naturally, have the strengths of both WYSIWYG and markup-based systems, and so its superiority doesn't really say anything about the relative utility of the two models.
Re:Goffice? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a nice theory, though I've never seen it work well. I've never been in an office, large or small, where MS Office templates were designed well, or consistently used. All too often, the "templates" are built by people who treat them like a prototype of a regular document, and use the easiest way to acheive visual appearances in a document, rather than defining styles, and even when styles are designed, lots of people don't use them and instead use direct format changes to acheive the appearance they want.
Word makes structural styling possible, but its usually easier (in the short-term: to get the right look in your WYSIWYG view) to do the formatting directly (though its harder to maintain, and easier to get lots of small inconsistencies that aren't apparent till you print the whole document and look at it), and most users seem to have learned the direct formatting more than the use of styles and structure.
As a result, maintenance of large Word documents that have had lots of hands on them over a decade (or more) is generally a nightmare of epic proportions.
That's one advantage of LaTeX even in the "standard template with no effort" role: if someone supplies a LaTeX document class to use, the easiest way to get results is usually going to be use structure and work with the class, rather than trying to fight it and apply appearance-based markup on your own.
I dunno, since I don't have it in the office, I've never used it for an office memo, but in most offices I've worked in, it'd be no more cumbersome to use TeX with a supplied document class than Word with a supplied template, and probably significantly less cumbersome.
Of course, to put together a TeX document class probably would take more skill than producing the Word memo templates used in most environments I've experienced.
Re:LaTeX (Score:4, Interesting)
Hold it, are you saying it is easy to enforce page limits in Latex? I would love to know how. I had to abandon Latex years ago because of that very problem. For example, preparing a press release that HAS to fit on a single page because it is going out by fax to 120 companies, or doing a 12-page document that has 12 sections, each of which HAS to fit entirely on its own page.
Doing this in WYSIWYG is relatively quick and easy - adjust fonts, adjust leading, edit some text - bang I'm done. In Latex it was a nightmare of slow and tedious tweaking, running and rerunning latex over and over and over until I finally got something that both fit and looked good doing it.
Re:500k? (Score:3, Interesting)
You know that "show quoted text" feature? Yea, well the quoted text is counted towards your "used memory" for every occurance of the text but is only stored once.
Re:Word support (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Apple will invent something. (Score:3, Interesting)
ClarisWorks was great for its day -- when it was rebranded AppleWorks, they added all the junk that ruined documents and caused the thing to crash. I've been using it since ClarisWorks 1.0, and the first update that Apple did was what began the downhill slide.
Pages is a page layout program, not an office package. It doesn't do vector graphics, bitmap graphics, spreadsheets, database, or word processing.
IIRC, MS Word was first released on Apple hardware (or at least that's where it became popular first). People were using Word on Macs back when the majority of the PC world was still using WordPerfect. The MBU was formed at a later date when MS started to get too big.