Geekery

[jarandhel]

As I'm sure anyone reading my journal has noticed, I like to write. A lot. I particularly like to write essays, though since losing my laptop I've had less and less time to work on them. I've tried to make up for that tendency somewhat by reverting back to using notebooks, but frankly I've gotten into a mental state where I write more quickly and more eloquently if I can simply sit down and type my thoughts. Normally, I'd be making use of my usb key to transfer data back and forth between the various computers I use, and keep drafts of my work with me at all times. My trusty usb key, however, has finally failed after a year of very heavy use. I will be getting a new one as time and money allow, but right now it's not a priority. I'm finding other ways around it. The way I would normally use to do this would be to get on gmail and send an email to myself with the draft in it, but frankly that clutters up my inbox. My backup, google notebook, is kind of clunky for real writing, and even for notes really. I'm moving away from using it. So where does that leave me? Actually, with a near-perfect solution: Google Documents and Spreadsheets, Google's answer to Microsoft Office. It may not be as full featured as a desktop-based word processor yet, but it more than fills my needs for jotting out a quick draft to later be pasted into LJ or wherever. I'm actually surprised I never thought of using it this way before. And it appears that Google Docs now has collaboration features built in, so if I ever want to write anything in tandem with someone else... *grins and winks at kyoudai02*

Now, maybe I'll FINALLY get around to writing all those essays I've been meaning to...

Comments

[kitten-goddess.livejournal.com]

It may not be as full featured as a desktop-based word processor yet."

Actually, that is a plus for those of us consigned to Micro$uck Hell. Ever notice that EVERY Micro$uck application is bloated with features that nobody uses (Mail Merge, anyone?) I think that's why they always crash. The poor programs are condemned to perpetual PMS due to all the bloating, so they're always grumpy and don't want to work.

Give me something basic that lets me type, print, save, etc. That's all I and 99% of other users want.

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

Actually, feature bloat has more to do with slow-loading applications, or applications that use a large amount of CPU when they are active, though there are ways to design around this by making the features of a program modular and only call upon those modules when actually needed. Firefox and it's extensions are one excellent example of how this can be accomplished through proper design. There are also a number of non-microsoft word processing programs that are quite feature rich and not prone to crashing. Abiword is a good word processing example, which is available for Windows as well as Linux and Mac OS X. The real problem with Microsoft's products is that they aren't very well tested or debugged, they are released to the market in a "good enough" condition that is more similar to other companies' beta editions of software, and Microsoft is often slow to release fixes to known problems. Especially if doing so will bring negative publicity, ie: fixing security holes. Though, to be fair, as a closed source project, Word does not have the benefit that many open source projects have of many eyes looking over the code and making fairly short work of most common bugs.