I've got to thank Elling graciously for the Writely invite he sent me. At last, I can get into this thing and see how I like it compared to Zoho Writer! So far, not much. Ugh—it has some really, really annoying quirks. I mean, gosh, Zoho has that prob where in Firefox, if I right-click multiple images and change their settings, the Image Properties floater stops coming up. And see how those hyperlinks are formatted differently? I didn't do that—Writely decided to reset my font choice. Annoying, and more like Wrongly. :\

Also, adding new hyperlinks is slow. Faster than the snails-pace of FCKEditor—which has to reload the contents of the window each time I add a link, taking 3 seconds—but slower than Zoho. I don't get why inserting a link should necessitate bringing up a "Working…" message, as it's such a minor operation! I pay attention to little things like this, because they're cumulative.

The colors of the UI are also weird. I'm into fancy colors, sure, but to have Olive tones and no way at present to change it—even Zoho has choices—has me a bit bothered. Actually, this scheme would go great with the Olive Windows XP theme, but since I'm using the Silver one and my Firefox theme is Charamel, it clashes badly!

What's also a bummer is not being able to add links to images yet. It's weird because you can certainly paste them in from other websites, so they do work in some capacity.

Another thing I just noticed—in Firefox, underlined links turn black, instead of retaining their usual distinctive colors (blue if not visited).

I've already sent a couple bug reports in…

Something I do like is the overall view of all the documents you're working on. Zoho has a cramped panel with rounded corners on the left, and I haven't figured out yet how to make it as tall as the main document edit window—so I can view all my docs! Or, even, to use a smaller font so I can see longer titles.

And the menus are easy enough to figure out. Maybe it'll grow on me… I'm hoping it will because these free tools, understandably still in early stages of development, are worth being happy about. :)

But I reckon if this is going to be more of a Google product, the interface should be more consistent. And I haven't tried the collaborative features yet. This is something I'm looking forward to.

Praying it forward, I've got some Writely invites to share so you can make your own informed decision. To get one, just add a comment to this entry with your name and email address.