Oct
15Review: Buzzword - Flex powered Word.
15
Posted: 15th October 2007
Tags: flash, Flex, RIA, RIAs
Posted in Flex
Comments: No Comments »
Buzzword is a revolutionary Rich Internet Application that allows anyone with a browser access to a powerful word processor that gives Microsoft Word a run for it’s money. Virtual Ubiquity the developers of Buzzword (which includes well known Flex blogger David Colletta) has recently been acquired by Adobe Systems.
Although Buzzword currently has a comparatively limited feature set, it gives you everything you need to produce professional and striking documents that can be printed directly from Buzzword or exported as Microsoft Word .doc file or Word 2003 .xml file.
Buzzword is one of those apps that successfully employs the 80/20 rule. In that 80% of people only ever use 20% of the features of an application. By only focusing on the features that you really need the developers of Buzzword have produced a very clean and easy to use Application. Don’t get me wrong there are loads of features including all the formatting options you would expect as well as the ability to add pictures, tables and lists.
Collaboration
ﾠLike Google Docs, Buzzword implements collaboration so you can share you documents with your colleagues etc and they can access and edit it concurrently leaving comments on their way. As soon as the document is saved the updates are send to everyone with an open copy.
History
Again like Google docs, Buzzword has the concept of revisions and a document can be rolled back to a particular version. You simply click on the visually pleasing sculpture in the bottom right-hand corner to open up a visual time line of revisions and by whom.
Spell Checker
Buzzword has an excellent spell checker build in, which works exactly like the one in Word which highlights mispelt words with a hatched red underline. Clicking the underline offers suggestions or the ability to ignore the word.
User Interface
Buzzword makes accessing all it’s features using a very easy to use ribbon interface that allows you to navigate through different tool bars of grouped features: Font Settings, Picture Settings, Table Settings, List Settings etc.
Overall what makes this app better than Google Docs is the feel of the app. Not only is it easy to use but Buzzword is a Rich Internet App and it lets you know that. There are some nice transition effects, which although do not contribute to the functionality, contribute to the look and feel. Buzzword feels solid and with that it is fast (This may be that it is still in private beta) but the fact that it is running in flash over being an AJAX based app probably makes a difference.
Conclusion
Buzzword really shows off what the future of web apps, in fact the future of applications is about. Because it is developed in Flex, the developers have the ability to easily deploy this as a cross-platform desktop application using Adobe AIR for now it is a very nicely designed web based word processor which walks all over Google Docs and has pretty much all the features of word that I use on a day to day basis.
More Information:
Comments below..
