Web-based Applications Crawling To Respectability
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to move to a browser-based office productivity suite. I toyed with the idea of using my annual Performance Objectives to force a significant switch in my personal software use. At this point, I'm kinda glad I didn't - I need features like AutoSave, AutoCorrect, and SpellCheck.
I was using writetomyblog.com to compose a post - a nice application, definitely worth a try - but had a few too many flighty web sites opened up. Firefox froze, and with no AutoSave, I lost at least 30 minutes of deep thought and pithy prose. That hasn't happened to me since the late 80's, when my 80286 AT crashed during a Turbo Pascal session; 2-3 hours of hacking, gone in an instant.
I know that web-based apps can do things like AutoSave; witness TiddlyWiki, now in heavy use as my personal KM environment. I like the fact that it has an AutoSave switch, but I did get burned a bit with this one too. Apparently, it saves my preferences in a cookie, so when I Clear Private Data, my settings get wiped out. It took me a bit of time to get used to - I even made the default tiddler display a Before you Start Typing ... note, just to make sure I check the setting.
The other killer feature for me is MS Word's AutoCorrect feature. I'm a horribly inaccurate typist (but fast!), and I crack people up when they read over my shoulder as I take notes. I rely on Word to clean up the obvious stuff as I hack away at the keyboard. Spell checking is another good one; I'm using ecto right now, and he's trying to tell me what I've misspelled with red underlines. A valiant attempt, maybe not 100% accurate - but it's still better than anything I've seen with a browser-based word processor.
I did find a Firefox extension to help bridge the gap a bit; It's All Text puts a button next to any text field on the web page; click it, and your favorite spell checking, auto-correcting text editor / word processor will pop up. Hit save, and your work gets saved to the web page - definitely a step in the right direction.
posted by James P. MacLennan at 10:27 PM
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