More web-based apps: productivity
I’m excited to see powerful, mature web-based apps emerge as real competition to MS Office. Here’s some I’ve been looking at recently.
Word Processing
The clear leader here is Writely, which is very mature and was recently purchased by Google. In the short time I tried it, it worked well and did not hiccup. Unfortunately, they’re in a holding pattern of sorts until they integrate with Google a bit and they’re not currently allowing new users to sign up.
ajaxWrite is a newcomer that’s gotten a lot of press lately. I encountered some snags when I tried to use it (which left a bad taste in my mouth) but it is pretty full-featured and matches the look of MS Word pretty closely.
Last, but certainly not least, is Writeboard. I actually use this a lot and it’s never let me down. It doesn’t try to be a substitute for MS Word but instead shines when you need to hammer out a smaller bit of text like a blog post, canned e-mail, or letter. I recommend you try it the next time you write something that’s less than one page. You can quickly export to a text file or HTML and I’ve used the HTML export a couple times to make a nice little web page for whatever reason.
Spreadsheet
The best online Excel replacement I’ve seen so far is iRows. I’d compare it to Writely in the way that it’s more polished than the competition, even if it does less. They also seem to have good momentum and have released several new features recently.
It’s main competitor seems to be Num Sum, which is more of a dead ringer for Excel but didn’t actually work that well in my casual test. (Next!)
Presentations
In the category of PowerPoint replacements, the only entrant I found was Thumbstacks. It worked well enough for me.
Of course, if you’re comfortable with HTML you can create full PowerPoint-style presentations using S5 from Eric Meyer. (I picked this up from A List Apart, which is an awesome site by itself.)
OK, web-based e-mail is nothing new, but in some ways Mailroom is the most interesting app on this list. It’s specifically designed for small groups of people that all share the responsibility to handling e-mail sent to one account.
A situation like this exists in my current job, and our method of handling it looks like lame hackery in comparison to what Mailroom offers. First, all e-mail exchanges with the same person are tied together similar to Gmail’s conversations. This makes it easy to see “what’s been going on” with this person.
Also, incoming e-mails are highlighted as Needs Attention if they’re older rather than the traditional newest-on-top paradigm. Finally, your outgoing messages are saved and replies are suggested based on the nature of the message.
BTW, I found some of these on a neat site called Solution Watch. This site seems oriented towards tracking these kinds of apps full-time. I just added it to my newsreader. :)
The only caveat to keep in mind with these new web services is that they’re usually hit-or-miss on the Mac, which IMHO reflects on the so-so state of Mac browsers. Safari is pretty fast but can’t handle a lot of these sites. Camino can but has issues of its own. I really want the answer to be OmniWeb, but that’s a topic for another day.
