Google & Writely

This morning I awoke to find an email I had been waiting for . I had finally been invited to join the writely beta test!

The general standard of new google services is very high and had been impressed by their spreadsheet program - and blown away by gmail.

However, after a couple of attempts at writing a letter I got bored. It is just a glorified HTML editor. Not much different to the one you use to post your blog. Ok you can collaborate and share online. But its not really any different to wordpad - a resource that comes free on most windows machines.

The other day google convinced me to move over to the firefox browser - at home. I did this and logged into writely for the first time. The first thing I tried to do was copy and paste from the windows clipboard - I pressed the print screen button to get myself a screenshot - and then tried to paste it into writely. However, Firefox doesn't allow the browser access to the clipboard - by default. I'm not sure if this is a setting that can be changed. I hope so.

So, attempt 2. I load up writely again - in IE6 this time. And try and paste from the clipboard - this time I did not get an error - although the image did not display - despite creating a box for it in the editor.

Eventually I got bored and gave up. Writely is in my opinion lackluster, although I must agree the price is right - and you can do your work wherever you have the net and a compatible browser. Although I'm not too sure that's important in a world where you can fit your own operating system onto a keyring these days.