Word processing in the browser has always been "convenient," but rarely has it been called "full-featured," or even "beautiful."
But the web apps status quo is set to change with the arrival of Buzzword, an office-caliber document editor with a visually rich user interface. Buzzword beats current Ajax-based offerings like Google Docs and Zoho Writer in both usability and aesthetic impact. And in a few months, when a desktop version is released, Buzzword will pose a serious challenge to Microsoft Word, the current king of document editing on the desktop.
The application has what you'd expect from a word processor – copy and paste, find and replace, text formatting – plus a few more features that have traditionally only been associated with desktop apps. It has intelligent margin, table and image formatting options as well as a sophisticated lists manager. Documents can be shared among users, and your classmates or co-workers can leave comments, which show up as little yellow pop-up notes in the right-hand margin.
On Thursday, the Buzzword team will be rolling in some additional enhancements to its product. The application will get a new document history manager, complete with content version rollback capability. The web app will also gain the ability to import and export documents to and from Microsoft Word. An inline spell checker is still being tested and will be released soon.
Buzzword was created by Massachusetts company Virtual Ubiquity. Founder and CEO Rick Treitman and the others on his team have over a decade of experience building office productivity software at Lotus.
"When we realized what could be done with applications on the web," Treitman says, "we thought, 'Somebody's going to build a really cool word processor for the web. There's no reason it shouldn't be us.'"
Buzzword is currently in a closed, invitation-only beta phase. A public beta will be available later in the fall, at which time anyone will be able to sign up and use it for free. (I have seen a guided demo of Buzzword and I've had time to test it out on my own.)
Buzzword was built using Flex, Adobe's set of tools for building rich internet applications in Flash. Later this year, Virtual Ubiquity will offer a downloadable version of the app for AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), the framework that allows Flash-based web applications to run on the desktop. Adobe is also an investor in Virtual Ubiquity, and the two companies maintain a close relationship.
The slick, Flash-based user interface is Buzzword's killer feature. Flash allows for some advanced menu behaviors that simply aren't possible with Ajax. There are no menu bars or palettes to take up room in the app – formatting options and context-sensitive menus slide into view only when you need them. Images and tables become transparent when you drag them around.
Wired News has been shown a demonstration of Buzzword running as an AIR application, and the desktop version is nearly identical to the browser version. Documents can be downloaded to a local machine running AIR, where they can be edited then synced to a hosted server the next time the user connects.
Obviously, the ability to run a web-based application on the desktop is the missing link required to make web apps truly usable in every situation – online and offline. Even as a solely web-based product, Treitman thinks Buzzword has a great advantage over current office app offerings.
"When you put Buzzword up against everything that exists today, it makes Ajax-powered word processors look old," he says. "Based on where this product is today, we think we have a big head start on anyone."
Web-based word processors are rarely exciting enough to draw cheers
from the masses. But document editing is something that nearly everyone
is familiar with, and, more importantly, a word processor is something
that nearly everyone uses daily. It is the broad reach of these
applications, and office productivity apps in particular, that helps us
assess whether web-based applications will ever reach the same heights
of success as their desktop counterparts.
