Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Hey you kids. Get off my lawn!!!

Writely becomes Google Docs. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. My gut reaction is I don't like it. It's possible I'm just being an old curmudgeon. I liked the old interface better. I was used to it. Perhaps I'll find everything works the same, but for now it's uncomfortable.

That's a problem with web based apps I hadn't considered before. With "buy it and install apps" I have the choice to upgrade or keep the old software if I want. With online apps the entire interface can change over night and the users have no choice in the matter.

One of the big problems with this change is they provide a link for suggestions for new features and the link is broken. A couple suggestions I have are: give us the option of keeping the old look and feel, and give us the spell checker back.

Personally I don't care how well it looks like the Google spreadsheet ap, because I'm not likely to use the spreadsheet until it gets a lot of new functionality. I understand they want a united front, but Google bought Writely for a reason. It was good and people liked it. One of the things we liked was the design. Now the design is gone and so is the branding.

I just hope they don't screw up YouTube.

OK, I guess I'm done ranting...

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3 comments:

Steve said...

I know they didn't ruin Writely. I was just a bit put out whne I found the interface completely changed around.

It's not that I won't be able to do everything I once did in Writely in Google Docs, it's that it changed and I have no ability to change it back. As I said in my post, at least if I was running this program from my hard drive I'd have the option to upgrade. There have been times where upgrades don't run as well as the previous version.

I did find the spell check. They moved it from the top of the page to the bottom.

Anonymous said...

You'd have thought someone might have thought about "skins" - surely couldn't be that difficult to manintain a Writely-like stylesheet alongside the Google one.

I have to say, using Writely felt like quite a pleasure from the off, and I forgave it its occasional bugs and quirks, just because it was... nice. Using Google docs feels more like a dull grey chore, and, if I do go on using it, I think I'll be a lot less tolerant of its shortcomings.

Interesting to compare Google's approach to this buyout with Yahoo's seemingly more hands-off approach to Flickr and Delicious (so far, touch wood!), both of which are still a delight to use.

As y'all say - wonder which way will the big G play YouTube?

Steve said...

Richard, I agree. The new look and feel are just off. I really don't like it. Skins would be a great addition.

I'm still using it, but that doesn't mean I like it.