Zoho Writer Beta - Review - Part 1
[b:837e5b7603]Zoho Writer Beta[/b:837e5b7603] Review
Part 1
The homepage of Zoho Writer Beta welcomes with a sign-in and a simple description about the product. No heavy marketing text. Says what this service is about, what you get, what you can do etc. The page looks inviting.
For some reason, zoho writer needs an email id or email id sort of username to login. Accidentally I used my fav id, typed the password, checked “I am a new user” and clicked on Sign in. It spitted back saying “Provide Valid Email Address”. Bit harsh! Finally I was able to register successfully with an email id.
One can notice a lot of client-server activity going on… and for a couple of seconds, you can see a blank white page, and the browser’s status bar displays “Transferring data from zohowriter.com…”. Then comes the interesting part. A progress bar is shown which says “Loading…” and it takes an average of 3 to 5 seconds to reach 100%. Seems to me like there are two Loading sessions, but only one gets stamped as “Loading” while the other is a white page. Oh btw, I use FireFox.
[b:837e5b7603]The first UI[/b:837e5b7603]
After loggin in , you are presented with the Zoho Writer in editing mode. This is the default. Earlier it used to show the list of all available documents. The Beta has changed and it is quite easy.
The UI is similar to web mail clients. The left side is smiliar to a folder management console, which gives access to all your saved/old docs, templates, shared docs and trash. The right side is the editor or your playground. The editor features all standard editing tools like font selector, size selector, bold, italics,indent, alignment, coloring tools and more. Below the toolbar is the large editing area.
[b:837e5b7603]Editing a new doc[/b:837e5b7603]
To edit a new document you have to click on the “NEW” button placed at the top left corner over the folder box. I thought it would create a new subfolder. But that was actually for creating a new document. I suppose the “NEW” should be placed above the editor pane or the button should be renamed to “New Document”.
Clicking on NEW clears the edit area and titles the document as “untitled” by default. The editing is standard as all web based editors. One funny thing I noticed is, when I created a table with border thickness of “0″, it turned invisible. I couldnt figure out where the table was. Need some fix here. Right clicking lists a menu that gives access to all Table-editing features like create row, delete row, create coloumn etc. Good thing. The table properties menu brings up an pop-up that controls the entire table’s appearance. It even has controls to specify colors for borders, background etc. The group “Style [CSS]” in the pop-up sounded too techie. Will novice/casual users understand that ? I would suggest it should be rephrased to “Borders & Colors”. Also the controls are not grouped properly. ZW developers should look into this. Give simple controls. There are some techie words “Layout > Float”, “Frames > Rules” which many are unaware of.
- End of Part 1