Comments on: Moving back to Google Docs from Buzzword

By: Ralf Scharnetzki

Ralf Scharnetzki — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:59:16 +0000

Interesting article that proves that speed matters. I collected some research material (that delivers additional facts to your finding) around the importance of performance and its impact on usageof a service: http://www.line-of-reasoning.com/interesting-links/research-proves-that-speed-matters-the-faster-your-service-is-the-more-it-will-be-used/

By: David Coletta

David Coletta — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:26:44 +0000

Hey Nathaniel, I’m one of the developers on the Buzzword team at Adobe, and I wrote the code that handles our dynamic loading of modules. That translates into the progress bars that you’re (unfortunately) seeing every time you launch Buzzword.

Normally, you should see those progress bars only the very first time you launch Buzzword. After that first, it should fire up very quickly on subsequent launches. So you’re hitting a problem that we’d like to fix.

I’m sorry that you’re hitting this problem. I’d like to get some more information about your configuration to see if I can understand more about it. Are you by chance running Safari on Mac OS X earlier than 10.5.3? If so, then you’re hitting a known problem in Safari that I have heard is fixed in OS X 10.5.3.

If you’re running a different configuration, then I’m especially interested, because we don’t believe we have any caching problems in other browsers or on other operating systems.

You can email me directly at buzzword_feedback@adobe.com with more details about this problem, or any other problems, suggestions, or praise (!) about Buzzword. Thanks for the blog post and hope to hear from you soon.

By: Aravind

Aravind — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:33:18 +0000

Jase & Luke : Thanks for your recommending Zoho!

Nathaniel : Do give Zoho a try.

By: Luke Gedeon

Luke Gedeon — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:58:28 +0000

I second the Zoho plug. It is a really great tool, and they are really responsive. If you like the way it works, I bet they would create a creative friendly theme for you. Just describe what you are looking for in a blog post. They are great at finding suggestions wherever they are on the web. Oh, and Zoho added offline before Google did.

If you are more into the DIY mode, Stylish for Firefox can re-skin Google quite nicely.

By: Is offline access on an online document editor important? « nerdflood

Is offline access on an online document editor important? « nerdflood — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:55:04 +0000

[...] by Nathaniel Payne For those interested, I posted a follow-up comment over on FriendFeed to my Google Docs / Buzzword post. One important aspect I forgot to include in that post: offline access. GDocs has offline doc sync [...]

By: Jonas

Jonas — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:17:28 +0000

Maybe the Stylish Extension, mentioned by lifehacker.com, could help you a little bit. Haven’t tried it myself, but with a bit of digging through the docs it could spice up your google docs page…

http://lifehacker.com/software/skins/download-of-the-day-stylish-firefox-extension-194604.php

By: Jase

Jase — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 08:13:28 +0000

Not without its own quirks but worth a look, check out Zoho Writer via http://zoho.com/

By: Ryan Stewart

Ryan Stewart — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 04:42:39 +0000

Hey Nathaniel,

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll pass it along to the Buzzword team. Hopefully the framework loading time goes away as we get more and more penetration of the latest version of the Flash Player and the team can turn on Framework caching.

Very valid concerns though, and thanks for using Buzzword!

=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com