Google Rebuilds Docs Platform 194
mikemuch writes "In addition to offering faster, desktop-like performance, better imported document fidelity, and more features found in standard Office apps, Google's new infrastructure for its web-based office suite will enable the company to more easily update the apps. A side effect (or benefit, depending on where you sit) is that the new platform will ditch Gears in favor of HTML 5. For a while starting May 3 there will be no offline capability whatsoever. Collaboration is a big focus, with a new chat sidebar and real-time co-editing. The new Docs and spreadsheet apps will be opt-in previews, but a new drawing app is launching fully. Both go live later today on the Google Docs site."
press release, not advertisement (Score:4, Informative)
A news website, with a summary that sounds like a press release.. nothing wrong here.
Not a marketing guy, but as I understand it a press release is different than normal advertising copy - it's news (in this case, news for nerds)
Two more days left to test it today! (Score:5, Informative)
If "real-time collaboration" and "side chat bar" sounds familiar, it's Etherpad:
Etherpad.com [etherpad.com]
Google bought the company few months ago in order to improve their Google Wave and Google Docs offerings, and I'm happy to see these efforts come to fruition. Google left the Etherpad.com service up for some more time. The end of that grace period is April 14-th (2 days from now), so you have 2 days to go and check what the new Google Docs will probably feel like. Make sure to check out the timeline replay feature, downright eerie and good fit for Google's pattern of Ubiquitous Tracking of Everything, I think.
The emperor has no clothes: the apps are poor (Score:5, Informative)
I recently took part in a collaborative project, resulting in a published book, which was done by means of Google Docs.
I was underwhelmed. I used only the "document" (word processing) tool. There were scores of little clunky things about the user interface, many puzzles and problems involving document exchange and permissions, and the "feature-completeness" of the application was maybe late 1980s.
But what really got me was that the basic editing operations were unreliable. I would insert a 12-point subheading above a 10-point text paragraph and the whole paragraph would change to 12-point text, stuff like that. Two sections might both show normal single-spaced line spacing within the editor, yet the final PDF output would render one of them as single-spaced and the other as double-spaced.
After a while I thought perhaps it was an incompatibility with Safari, although Google does not suggest any such thing, and switched to Firefox. There were still continual problems of this kind, popping up randomly; perhaps not as often and perhaps not exactly the same as under Safari.
If this were running locally under Windows or Mac OS, people would roll on the floor laughing at it. Apple's TextEdit or Microsoft's WordPad would blow it out of the water. If this is the best Web 2.0 can do, local PCs are safe.
The thing is, the press writes about them as if Google Docs were a full-featured, commercial-quality applications... as good a substitute for Word as, say, OpenOffice. It isn't. Under some conditions I guess the collaborative features make it better than nothing (the book got finished).
No doubt the marketers will spin it out endlessly by with continuous frank acknowledgement that whatever is the actual Google Docs you can get now IS a joke, it is the NEXT one that will be desktop-application quality--just as the next version of Windows will be secure and easy to use. We will see. But the current Google Docs, if considered as a serious alternative to a locally-hosted application, is a joke.
Re:No offline capabilities.... (Score:3, Informative)
The reason there's no Offline capability in the new GoogleDocs is cause it's not ready yet. They say, in so many words, that they plan to have the HTML5 Offline Mode up and running soon. Until then, use the Old Version + Gears.
This may not have been a good idea, but it is very Google-esque to roll out a new product with features missing.
Re:JavaScript (Score:5, Informative)
What's the point of using an interpreted language when you could compile to, download and execute bytecode much more efficiently?
Because while Javascript sucks, is bandwidth-intense and slow, it is the only Turing-complete, client-side, barely-cross-platform Web programming environment that Microsoft has implemented and which Microsoft is still forced to keep around on all default installations of Windows/Explorer.
You are perfectly right that bytecode environments are much better choices technically, but they are worth nothing to Google as long as Microsoft keeps them out of their default browser installs.
[ Note that on platforms that Google is able to influence in their entirety they are using bytecode solutions aggressively - see Android. ]
Microsoft adopted (and extend) Javascript because it wanted to kill Netscape so badly. Once they achieved that they couldn't kill Javascript anymore because 1) half of the web ran on it 2) they were lying low after the bloody [and illegal] battle with Netscape raised the interest of various [civil] law enforcement agencies 3) Microsoft thought they made Javascript incompatible enough and did not really realize how it still enabled Google's cloud apps - until it was too late.
Microsoft tried to hold out with a sucky Javascript engine as long as it could, but they eventually had to give in.
It's kind of ironic that this small domino started 10 years ago by Microsoft caused the increasingly apparent demise of Microsoft Office.
It will take another 10+ years for the process to be complete (the 100+ billion business that Microsoft has become has a lot of inertia) but it will happen - the world generally strives to optimize out the overhead of that 100+ billion dollars tax that Microsoft has become by today.
Re:HTML5 Features (Score:3, Informative)
You built a new PC, you installed Firefox, you entered username/password for the mailserver, you logged into GMail.
I built a new PC, I installed Outlook, I entered a username/password for the SSL IMAP mailserver.
Just kidding, I didn't even have to enter username/password as I could migrate my Windows account profile with a couple of clicks.
Re:The emperor has no clothes: the apps are poor (Score:5, Informative)
I think you'll find the point of the rewrite was to solve all these issues. Read the article - Docs no longer relies on your browser to do things like correctly positioning bullet points. It does it all itself.
Full disclosure. I am a Googler and we've been using this new version of Docs internally for a while. It is a significant improvement. The old Docs was basically a wrapper around your browsers HTML editing feature that auto-saved every few seconds. The new Docs is a real word processor that understands things like page breaks natively. It is fully consistent in every browser and features the real-time collaboration you saw in Wave. I enjoy using it a lot more.