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As a writer by trade I have a habit of try­ing every word-processor I can get my hands on. For day to day work, I still use Word – although a heav­ily cus­tomised stripped back ver­sion. But I have this per­pet­ual feel­ing that there’s a bet­ter option out there. Of course, today, there are more options than ever before (even for a Mac user).

So to date I’ve tried a vari­ety of desk­top options:

• Word – good but bloated
• OpenOf­fice and its Mac vari­ant NeoOf­fice – pretty much as good as Word if not quite as pretty (and still pretty bloated)
• Apple’s Pages – OK but feels more like a DTP wannabe than a writer’s tool of choice
• Bean – nicely stripped back but lack­ing some of the fea­tures I need
• Scrivener – a dif­fer­ent take on a writ­ing appli­ca­tion, par­tic­u­larly good if you’re writ­ing a book
• Think­Free Office – very nice (and prob­a­bly the one I’d spend my own money on)
• Write­room – super-stripped back option that reminds me of the very early days of the likes of Word­star

Of course, today there are also the web-based AJAX apps (Google Docs (for­mally Writely), Zoho, ThinkFree’s own online suite and 37 Signal’s col­lab­o­ra­tive Write­board). The trou­ble I’ve gen­er­ally found with these was they are so s l o w. Plus, there is the ongo­ing issue that you need a web con­nec­tion to use them – fine when I’m in the office or at home but a lit­tle more tricky when out and about.

Enter: Buzz­word

So today, I’ve been play­ing with my lat­est option, Buzz­word. And on a first pass, it’s really very good. Devel­oped by Vir­tual Ubiq­uity and sub­se­quently bought by Adobe, Buzz­word is built with Flex to run in the Flash player of most main­stream browsers (although not Opera — grrr).

The first thing that struck me was how much more respon­sive it felt than other web-based options. There wasn’t any notice­able lag. Text looked great on screen (although they need to work on print quality).

The menus don’t sim­ply ape Word. They slide in and out in that nice Flash kind of way, just offer­ing what you need at the time. The doc­u­ment organ­iser lets you see your files in a vari­ety of ways – neatly, if you choose ‘size’ it divides them by how many pages they’ve go, not by bytes. Like­wise the scroll bar shows where you need to go to for each page in your document.

I haven’t played with the col­lab­o­ra­tion part yet, but as soon as I find a will­ing col­league with some time, I’ll get on to it.

Buzz­word is by it’s nature stripped back, but offers most of the fea­tures most peo­ple would need. It is also in its early stages so I’d expect to see more bells and whis­tles added soon (although hope­fully stop­ping short of becom­ing bloatware).

Then of course, there’s still the issue of need­ing to be online. That’s where Buzz­word holds out the intrigu­ing pos­si­bil­ity of offer­ing an offline ver­sion using Adobe AIR – an Adobe tech­nol­ogy that allows Flash, Flex and AJAX appli­ca­tions to run on the desktop.

This could get very interesting.

Source: Adap­tive Path

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