Buzzword: The Best Online Word Processor Yet… Almost

Most of you know that I’m a bull when it comes to online applications like word processors — what’s come to be called “Cloud Computing.” I was an early adopter of Writely (now part of Google Applications), a Beta tester on Zoho, and I’ve tried just about every available Web-based word processor of any renown at all. Each has its good points, and the better ones like GDocs and Zoho rival most of the applications that run on your desktop. They are convenient to use, and have the advantage (to my mind) of residing on someone else’s servers instead of being desktop-dependent. That means that you can move from computer to computer (including from the old one that got stolen to the new one that you couldn’t afford but had to have) without any loss of data. You can even use a machine at the library, or one of the new ultra-miniatures that are tailor-made for this kind of computing.

I have used Google’s offering extensively, and like it for its security: Google’s servers ain’t goin’ nowhere, and if they do there are 300K more of the suckers — at least — for redundancy. While I actually like Zoho’s Writer better for its refinements like margin controls, I have no idea where their data is stored nor how secure or redundant it might be.

Well, all of that was then. Today I looked at Adobe’s “Buzzword” — a Flash-based online word processor — for the first time. Unless it turns out to have an unexpected extra head or something like that, I expect to be looking at it a lot more. I’m not going to bore you with a rundown because (a) I haven’t used it enough yet to do a good critique — although I’m happily typing this thereon — and (b) there’s an excellent walk-through that you can access at the link above, or this one, or the one below.

On dialup, the load time is simply out of the question. We’re talking minutes, many minutes here, folks! Once the download is complete, Buzzword runs fine, communicating with the servers slowly, but not unreasonably so. About the same as Google Apps or Zoho, both of which load much faster since they use AJAX.

Yo! Buzzword folks! Not everyone has broadband, and many who do have low-speed. This app is annoyingly draggy to load over my 6 Mb connection, and it’s useless on dialup. Get on it!

On the up side, Buzzword is pretty much a full-fledged word processor, with margin controls (including indents and hanging margin), a couple of dozen shortcuts, comments, collaboration — in short, most of the bells and whistles you’d expect. I can’t think of anything essential that’s missing, although some features need to be fleshed out, and a beautiful GUI. It’s early days yet, and I’d say that Buzzword, rather than GApps or Zoho, is most likely to bring the virtual office to the masses if they’re able to make it available to the great dialup unwashed. The Flash platform is the fastest-growing medium on the Web, and Adobe are the guys to ram it down M$’s throat. It will be interesting to see what they have to offer in terms of database, spreadsheet and presentation applications, which have to be in the works.

I’m seriously impressed. I’ll continue to use it until it lets me down, and then evaluate it more critically, perhaps. At present I can only find two flaws apart from the massive download: it uses proprietary Adobe fonts that default rather uninterestingly in most browsers and programs other than Buzzword (and double the time of the download), and it won’t save documents in .pdf format — which seems odd, when you think about it. Apart from that, all the shortcuts work in the usual way, the innovative toolbar system is nice and unobtrusive, and the desktop is uncluttered. The basic setup is for 8.5″ (22 cm) stock, so everything looks pretty much like it will when printed or on a Web page.

Images are easy to insert and re-size, and text-wrapping is done automatically depending on the positioning of the object.

You can save in .doc, .rtf, .txt, html (zipped) and Micro$oft’s dumb proprietary XML and “open” formats, and open them as well with some loss of fancy formatting in the Micro$oft documents. No OpenOffice formats yet, but one hopes that’s just around the corner. It will almost have to be, since both Zoho and Google make it available, and they’re the ones to beat. Oh, yes… Adobe’s servers are likely to be around for a while, too.

Check out Buzzword. It’s well-named.

PS: All this, and platform-independent, too. Collaborate with your MacBuddies, or your poor Windower friends.