Adobe has acquired Virtual Ubiquity's Buzzword, a web-based Flash word processor. There are a lot of online productivity suites and applications right now — see Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Zoho Office and ThinkFree, for example. What does Buzzword offer?
Buzzword is a stunning achievement in design. Of all the PC-compatible word processors available — including the desktop juggernaut Microsoft Word — Buzzword is the easiest on the eyes and has the most elegant user interface. It displays beautiful type. Its interface elements, from the cursor to menu items, make excellent use of colour, and they slide and fade instead of popping and blinking.
Buzzword has some very nice features. The product handles lists better than most other word processors, allowing you to join or split items. It does a great job with pagination — something many online-only products have a problem with. Text flows in real-time around images. Buzzword allows full formatting in comments, including images and tables, which could make the commenting function very useful for groups. There's also a full revision history for each document, and authors can revert to previous edits.
At the moment, the product also has very limited font support (there are just seven fonts available). It also has extremely limited output support: you can save a document in the Buzzword system, export it to Word or RTF or print it. But you can't save to HTML nor, ironically, to Adobe's own PDF format.
We have been shown an AIR-based version of Buzzword that can run outside the browser, but this requires a live internet connection to work. A version of the product that can work offline is coming.
Buzzword is a great framework around which Adobe can build its online productivity suite. We were told that a number-handling product (the reps wouldn't use the word 'spreadsheet') and a presentation application are in the works. But as slick (and free) as it is, in its current form Buzzword is not a word processor we'd recommend unreservedly.
Talkback
I am not fast typist, and even that, I am faster than the interface. While typing and many letters are missing because they get lost. At the beginning I suspected of my typing skills, and I though that I was missing the keystrokes, but it wasn't that. I tested in more than one computer and same result, I don't even type 40wpm.