Zoho Writer Gets "True" Offline Mode
Posted on November 26, 2007
3 Comments
Three months ago, the Zoho folks announced an offline mode for Zoho Writer. While nifty and all, it was essentially read-only and not quite as useful as I might’ve hoped. You could sync your Zoho docs offline for access, but not change anything. (Zoho Show would benefit greatly from this!)
They raised the bar a bit more today with the announcement of Offline Editing. As before, it relies on Google Gears for the online/offline stuff. It works very well and offers a lot of great functionality — we can keep working with our Zoho docs even when there’s not an Internet connection. Aside from some issues below, this gets Zoho Writer really close to being a true competitor in the word processing space.
I also think it’s somewhat amusing that Zoho is beating Google Docs to these features — while using Google Gears to do it!
Before I forget, Writer also received pagination and some other neat features earlier this month too.
However…
You better plan ahead for that lack of connection or your sync (and docs) won’t be current.
Not all features are supported when offline. In particular, I was dismayed to not see the ability to Create or Import new documents. Bummer. At least we are warned:
You’ll notice that not all functionalities available online are available in offline mode. This is because some of the functionalities are online specific while others will make their way into the offline mode moving forward.
About the Google Gears Thing…
While I think Google Gears is right up there with sliced bread in terms of importance, I still think we need a “framework” of some sort around all Gears enabled apps. If I’m planning on going offline, I really don’t want to have to visit every offline/Gears enabled webapp and click each one’s respective “Go Offline” button. I want to click one button and watch my Google Reader, Zoho Writer, etc. all sync at once.
I wrote a bit on this back in June — I think it is still relevant.
Hey Zoho guys? After doing Zoho Sheet (hopefully on the horizon), would you consider taking on offline enabling Zoho Notebook and/or Zoho Planner? That would be an interesting competitor in the OneNote and EverNote world, wouldn’t it?
Tags: google-gears, onlineoffice, sync, zoho, zoho-writer
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3 Responses to “Zoho Writer Gets "True" Offline Mode”
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Chris:
We plan to focus on improving this offline capability further before we launch new apps with offline capability. Yes, Notebook and Planner will be available offline too.
Hi Raju - Great news on both counts