Buzzword Beta Brings Desktop-Style Word Processor To Your Browser
Adobe’s entry into the online office fray is now a public beta. Previously Buzzword, as the new word processor and online collaboration app is known, could only be accessed with an invitation.
We took a look at the private preview a while back (before Adobe acquired Buzzword from Virtual Ubiquity) and came away impressed. So what does Buzzword offer that you won’t find in Google Docs, Zoho Writer, or ThinkFree’s online offerings? In terms of features, Buzzword is on par with the rest, though it does offer better font support, but Buzzword’s real appeal is the slick interface.
Unlike the other online office suites, Buzzword is built in Flash and features a much nicer interface that feels more like a traditional desktop processor. Notable features include copy-and-paste, find and replace, text formatting and support for tables, images and page breaks.
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.
As with the others, Buzzword allows you to create and store documents online, share them with collaborators and print or download them as Word or RTF files.
In my testing this morning I found Buzzword to be quite useable for a beta, though I did have a few problems. The much vaunted copy-and-paste is somewhat erratic, sometimes it worked others it didn’t. Also, there doesn’t appear to be a way to add active hyperlinks to a document.
Of course Buzzword is still a public beta and it certainly has a few kinks to work out before it’s ready to compete with the likes of Zoho and Google Docs.
That said, the interface is quite slick and I can see where this would a perfect fit for Adobe AIR (Adobe reportedly has a version of Buzzword in AIR though it hasn’t been released yet).
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