Not long for this Word

Is the end of the Word at hand? Microsoft Word, that is.

While it is certainly too early to pre-write a celebrity obit, the era of the Big Box word processor may by fading into oblivion. Or, in the terms of the Hippie culture, "Why pay for it when it's free, man?"

Several new developments are no doubt generating flop sweats in Redmond. One is a surprisingly full-featured open-source word processor called AbiWord. For one, it's free. Nada. Download it, install it, get to work. The whole process of downloading and installing it took not significantly more time, and this is the truth, than launching MS Word on my Intel Mac. A 9mb download (on broadband, that's an eyeblink - as small as a single song from iTunes), double-click the icon, drag to applications, and there you go. And for that you get a full-featured word processor, does decent page layouts and web layouts. All the goodies - headers and footers, endnotes, footnotes, spellcheck, tables - all the stuff from Word you use and none of the junk you don't. Try it out, for Mac OS X, Unix, and if you must, Windows. If there's one downside, it's the ugly icons. If anyone wants to break into the open-source developer community and come up with some decent icons for AbiWord, I'm sure they would appreciate it! I know I would.



But more significantly, an evolution in the web-based productivity tools has real potential. I've been a fan of Google docs, and more recently, Zoho Writer, for awhile now. Both are decent word processors in their own right, but the fact that they are browser-based (read "free"), track revisions, and allow for concurrent multiple users to collaborate takes them to a level that dedicated applications such as MS Word haven't gotten to yet.

One drawback, of course, has been that if you are not online, you can't work on your docs. Enter Google Gears. Gears is a plug-in for Firefox that allows you to work on your documents offline, and they then sync when you reconnect. The process is almost seamless. Install Gears, create a document in Zoho Writer, then choose Go Offline and up to 25 documents are available to you offline. Unlike the "Save as..." option you've always had, working offline keeps the Writer interface, document list and so on, and automatically syncs the documents when you reconnect.

So, you're working in your office, click "Go Offline," haul your laptop to the airport, work on the docs on the plane, and then sync online when you get to the next WiFi hotspot. Sweet.

Now, wonder if it works with my iPod touch...

--Brad

I have a Dream-weaver

Just finished a 3-hour "Basics of Dreamweaver" session this morning for a roomful of almost total web rookies. What is striking to me is the moment about two hours into the session when I was explaining the function of the

tag and css when I realized that for all but one of these people, all the web design functionality they needed could be had through tools like Blogger, Flickr and MySpace.

At the same time, I'm looking at the pros and cons of installing Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and having some real doubts about whether I need it. I've recently been using an open source Word processor called AbiWord that a student showed me. Except for really ugly icons, it works great.

Even more interesting (and threatening to MS Office) is the Google Gears technology that lets users work on online documents while offline, then sync those documents when you connect. Implemented by Zoho Office in November and available or coming soon to other online web apps, this has enormous potential to change the way we work and collaborate.

The connection between Dreamweaver and MS Office is that they seem to be retreating a little bit more every day into increasingly specialized niches, and ultimately into obsolescence. Big, do-it-all, expensive applications for everyday tasks like writing, crunching numbers, making presentations and publishing on the web just don't seem like a good idea anymore.

--Brad

Lost in translation

This week I was working with a student who's first language is Japanese, and I was showing her how to login to Blackboard, the course management system we use at Edison.

We were talking about her portable translator and I showed her the Sherlock translator on the Macs, and the Babelfish translator online at Yahoo! Where she has an email account.

When we translated the login page, something curious happened that still has me wondering - everything seemed to translate reasonably well, except "click here to login" translated as "the sound of dust here to login."

Does anyone know why "click" is translated into Japanese as "the sound of dust"? A "soft" sound, perhaps? Or the sound of a small insect?

Curious.

It is awesome, though, to see an entire webpage rendered in Kanji in a matter of seconds. I think I'll incorporate language translation and back-translation into my web Development courses to watch out for idioms and other English jargon.

--Brad

Ah, yet another blog site....

My intention is to post to this site fairly regularly on interesting issues related to Internet development and interactive media.

We'll see.

--Brad