Shadows In Motion

Back in August I wrote a brief pre/review of a collaborative authoring service called Writely. Both the article and Writely proved to be surprisingly popular.

Now fast-forward to today and Writely has themeselves some competition. It’s called Zoho Writer and I took some time out of my afternoon to run it through some tests. As before, screen shots are included in this preview.

Zoho Writer is currently in an Alpha stage and, though there are understandably bugs, I’m fairly impressed with it. Just as with Writely, Zoho Writer looks more-or-less identical to a desktop document editor. All of the expected features are there. Text changes such as fonts, colors, background colors, tables, HTML, text alignment and so on are all there in the expected interface.

Here is what you see when you first load Zoho Writer:

Look sparse? You bet. Take notice of the “Loading…” in the top-right area of the window. In the (full featured) demo you’ll be looking at this empty screen for 13 to 20 seconds before the document list finishes loading. At first this was a matter of concern, but I want to draw your attention to the links to the Pages 1 through 5 and beyond in the center of the image.

There are literally thousands of documents that have been created in Zoho Writer by various testers. No, not every document is listed on a single page and, yes, I do think that they need a speed increase. Still, for an Alpha release I think that it’s doing a great job handling that many documents to begin with. The worse part is that you’ll have to deal with this pause for now every time that you click on the Documents button.

On the up side, if you’re currently viewing a document there is a small link that provides quick access to the most recent few documents that have been added or edited, and this brings us to our next screen shot:

(You may want to keep this image open in another window to refer back to it)

The link that I was referring to is in the top-right area and is predictably called Recent Documents. By the way, what you’re seeing in that screen is a list of bugs that I was keeping while testing Zoho Writer.

You will no doubt notice the Post To Blog button. I’m unable (and otherwise unwilling) to test this feature at this time because it seems specific to Blogger hosted blogs. Still, this is an exciting feature. Yourself and others could easily collaborate on content and make sure that it’s exactly how you would like it to be before you add it to your blog’s content.

Truly a nice feature and I hope that other blog systems are supported in the future.