The Writely Way to Work

For a while now, my daily desktop has been filled with almost nothing but Firefox windows, each of which contains a healthy/unhealthy half-dozen tabs. One of these, is Gmail, which takes care of my email. Another is Bloglines, which gives me that reassuringly constant flow of information. For my own blogging, I pour straight into Blogger. In fact, aside from the odd MP3 player, about the only other app that I use constantly is the OpenOffice.org word processor, Writer.

Maybe not for much longer.

For Writely, Google's Web-based word processor, has finally opened its registration to all (I stupidly missed the first round). Having tried it on and off today, I have to say I'm totally impressed.

As a writer, I depend on my word-processor to do the things I need, the way I need, and then to get out of the way. Writely seems to manage this. Since my technical demands are very limited - as a pure word-machine I almost never use anything fancy in the way of images, tables or boxes, although I do demand .odt support, which Writely provides - it may well be that Writely is all I will ever require.

Moreover, it offers one huge and unique advantage for me: it will let me work on any of my PCs, on any platform, without the need to copy across and sync files constantly. In time, I expect that this will extend to things like mobile phones, too; clearly, this kind of platform- and device- independence is the Writely way to work.