The buzz on Buzzword
So I finally got to try Buzzword. And believe be: at least my first impression is that it’s really something amazing. A sleek, intuitive interface, features that are both handy and easy to use, document sharing, fast loading. You know, it’s all that. The reasons why Adobe has acquired Virtual Ubiquity, the company behind this software, are cristaline now.
Some features I’d highlight so far:
- The interface, of course: it’s not only beautiful, but very intuitive, hiding what doesn’t need to be used at the moment, while making it very easy to get to the other features whenever needed;
- Real fonts: you’re not stuck with Times, Verdana or whatever’s bundled with your OS. The starting pack offers Adobe Garamond, NewsGothic and Minion, among others all in Opentype format. And the Adobe acquisition surely has much more good things to offer in the typography department;
- Offline editing;
- Easy to use commenting system, ready for multiple users;
- Simple but comprehensive history for tracking changes in the document;
- Very good printing quality and fidelity to the original document;
- The insightful vertical scroll-bar, which shows page numbers;
And all of these in a seamless, ‘just-feels-right’ way that GoogleDocs has not be able to achieve so far. The only feature I missed was paragraph/character styles. For the remaining, it does a remarkable job on the set of features that matter for 90% of the users.
Microsoft, watch out. The online office is just around the corner, and Adobe is going strong at it.
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