Will Your Mac’s Next Word Processor Be Online and from Adobe?

Having never re-installed MS Office after I upgraded to Leopard, I occasionally find myself needing a Word alternative. The answer, I discovered, is online.

As school has now restarted for the year (I’m in Australia if you’re a little confused), and although I’m studying design, I do have a need sometimes to use Word. However, not having it at home, I sought out alternatives that could run the same application at both home and school. Pages is okay, except of course it doesn’t save to the doc format, you must export to it, but more importantly, we don’t have Pages on the Macs at school. Thus the obvious alternative became something web-based.

Several online Word-compatible word processors exist, most notably Google Docs, Zoho, and the king of Word-compatibility, ThinkFree Office.

Google Docs is too limited and has a terrible GUI. Zoho has more functionality and a better interface. ThinkFree’s biggest problems are it’s slow and its full editor is not Safari compatible. But it has so many Word features that no other online word processor has, it’s almost a shoe-in.

But I stumbled across one that’s a balance of all things, and you know, I’m going to bet my house on it. And that is Adobe’s Buzzword.

Like Google Docs and Zoho, and by comparison to ThinkFree, it is limited, although it does have most features users require.

Where Buzzword kills its competitors, though, is the same place Apple does: design. Buzzword is so gorgeous you just want to use it. Nothing out there, not even Apple’s own apps, have as nice a visual design as Buzzword. Click here for an image comparing the GUI of all four.

It must be noted, however, that Adobe did not develop Buzzword and in fact acquired it when it bought Virtual Ubiquity, as detailed in this FAQ. That said, Adobe was a financial backer of Virtual Ubiquity to begin with.

A couple of other important points in that FAQ give a clue to the future of Buzzword.
- Being built on Adobe’s Flex and AIR technologies, an offline version should become available sometime.
- Adobe’s commitment to Buzzword means its feature set will continue to grow, bringing it much closer to ThinkFree.

Current features include headers and footers, multi-level list numbering and bullets, tables, collaboration and commenting, images, word count, and a spell checker. And one particularly great feature of all these online word processors is they keep a revision history. And did I mention it has a gorgeous interface?

What about Apple?
So where does Apple come into all this?

Online applications is certainly a rapidly growing domain, so Apple needs to consider its own entry into the online market. Obviously this would be a nice fit with .Mac. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are great applications, but will quickly look antique if Apple doesn’t provide an online version of them, even if it is at first with trimmed down versions.

Adobe’s AIR and Flex, which were formally released this week, are probably the development platform Apple should be pursuing, as these provide both an offline and online interface to files.

As hard as it is to imagine, your next word processor may not be from Apple or even Microsoft, but from Adobe. Buzzword is as much a thing of beauty as any Apple product, and is also just as functional. Check it out. Get seduced. This is the one to watch in this space.