Blog - stephen gentle dot com

I have been taking a look at Adobe’s new Buzzword word processor. Basically, Buzzword is a flash based web application, and I have to say, it is very nice. As you can see from the screenshot above, the text rendering absolutely brilliant, with access to real typefaces like Myriad and Minion, as opposed to the boring Arial you generally see in normal web based word processors.

Being written in Flash, it has quite a few other advantages apart from nice typefaces too - nice image wrapping for one; better tables another. The interface is also a lot more dynamic than most word processors - whether they be applications or web based. It’s certainly nicer than the new Microsoft Office look, and is very nice to use.

The application can export to a range of different file formats, like rich text, Microsoft Word formats, plain text, HTML and also Adobe PDF - although Evince wouldn’t open the PDF that I exported… It also boasts good collaboration features (like most other internet word processor), but that’s not much use to me, so I haven’t tried any of that.

All in all, it looks like a word processor that I might actually consider using in the future. It’s certainly a project to keep an eye on. Check it out at Acrobat.com - you have to sign up to use it first.

I downloaded the second beta of IE7 today. It does have tabs and it does do transparent PNGs, but like its predecessor, it still messes up a lot of pages that use standards compliant CSS. It is messing up the page on which I am writing this entry on! The max-width property still hasn’t been implemented, and it displays input objects strangly. The user interface is very new and strange, especially for someone who has been using browsers with the standard interface since 1998… For example, it dosen’t have any menus at the top. On the toolbars, the first one only has back, foward, the address bar and a search box, plus small icons for refresh and stop that took a while for me to find, as being so small, they don’t really grab your attention. Then comes the tab bar, and at the end is the home, print etc.

The printing interface is excellent as you have a lot of control, but it can’t print styles, which makes it a lot less cool.

All in all, its better than IE6, but it still lacks a lot of features that firefox users have come to take for granted. Sorry Bill, but the cool printing feature and redesigned UI is not going to convince me to switch. Also, I’m sure that by the time that M$ releases the final version of IE7, there will be new versions of Firefox and Safari that match all the new features, and also add more.

Rating: 4.5 out of 10

-Stephen