I have written recently about Web 2.0, and Ajax applications – well another one has appeared today, WriteBoard.
Writeboard is an Ajax driven online Word Processor – similar to Writely – one of the other Ajax applications I mentioned last week.
There are a couple of differences and similarities between Writely and Writeboard which are worth noting – firstly both systems allow for online collaboration – i.e. you invite others via email to contribute to the document, both allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds for the document and both allow for basic text formatting but that’s about all they have in common.
In terms of differences, Writely has a nice WYSIWYG text formatting interface whereas Writeboard requires you to enter codes before and after text to format it (i.e. surround text with “*” to make it bold and “_” for italics!). Writely usefully allows you to associate Tags with your document and to save your documents as a Word Doc. or as a Zip file!
All in all, Writeboard is extremely sparse on functionality and has a lot of catching up to do before it becomes as cool an Ajax application as Writely.
Via Brian Benzinger
Brilliant! looks like Writeboard is another outlet for Basecode 🙂
37 signals have just integrated Writeboard into their project management tool Basecamp that we currently use. That integration makes it a winner for us and has already proved itself invaluable in the few days we have been using it.
In real terms it allows us to mock up the entire content of a site with different pages, inter linking like the end navigation and versioning on the extranet before any design begins. The client has a better understanding of the end site structure and so hopefully will require less changes in the content when they eventually see it in the beta version.
Also it looks like Microsoft are getting in on the game with a hosted version of office. http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=172900624
Came across another online word processor named Zoho Writer :
http://www.zohowriter.com
It’s worth trying.
I second zohowriter. it has released its beta now with a cool user interface. features like export as doc,sxw,Pdf. posting to blogs, e-mailing docs in and out of your account are worth mentioning.