Google’s New Writely
Google purchased writely.com, a web-based word processing application, a few months back to be included in it’s suite of productivity tools. Ever since this purchase, the interface has remained the same.
Last night, as I was wriging a paper, I noticed that a planned outage was to occure that evening. Strangely, it mentioned that it would happen an hour before I was even reading the message! Nevertheless, I periodically went back to the list of documents to reference things. One very well timed refresh of this list provided me with a brand shiney new interface!
They have merged the documents from writely into the list of spreadsheets. It looks really nice! It provides the ability to tab documents now, as you can see with my Economics papers being tagged as “ECO305.” There are a few downsides though. Things that were present in Writely but not in this new interface that I miss a lot already. That should tell you something. These include the inability to rename a document from the list of documents. One must go into the document to rename it. Furthermore, one can no longer upload a new revision of a document. It has to be uploaded as a new document, the old one deleted and the new one renamed to be the old one.
Nevertheless, overall I’ve been pretty impressed by this new interface. I’d say give it a shot! It also seems as though the old speardsheets link ‘http://spreadsheets.google.com‘ now redirects to ‘http://docs.google.com‘