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To me, Ajax is that fresh smelling powder my grandmother used to sprinkle on the carpet before vacuuming her house in Swanland. Clearly times change. Apparently Ajax is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and is used to create Internet applications that are wholly interactive. What joy. Wherever I turn these days, it’s there: ajax and the great new dawn. It looks good to me.

In my quest to discover an online word processor that would allow me to work across different computer platforms (Windows and Linux) and different computers, I stumbled upon ZohoWriter. It wasn’t my natural choice: the swish marketing sold ThinkFree to me at first, but however hard I tried, I just couldn’t register my account. I tried using every computer I could get my hands on, using different operating systems and different web browsers. I worked through every suggestion from their help desk, all to no avail. And so I abandoned that quest of mine, until one day I decided to give Zoho a whirl. I didn’t like the look of it at first, for it looked too basic, like nothing more than a basic text editor. But appearances are deceptive and I soon found that I really liked Zoho after all. In fact, I’m pretty much starting to love it.

This is what is great about Zoho writer:

1. Like your desktop word processor, it has auto-save built in. In fact it auto-saves constantly, much more regularly than you’d be used to. If you’re used to losing emails you’ve spent an hour composing on the webmail because the session timed out, you’ll appreciate this feature a lot.
2. Also like your desktop word processor, it has a spellcheck feature that underlines all of your mistakes in red, providing alternatives on a single left click on the highlighted word. This is fabulous.
3. It has a word and character count function, perfect for those times when you have to submit an article to a maximum number of words.
4. It allows you to export your document as a PDF (Adobe Acrobat), or as a Word or OpenOffice document, and to Rich Text, Text and HTML. PDF is particularly useful I think.
5. It also lets you import files straight from your word processor, so you can upload a Word document or OpenOffice file without having to do a cut and paste job.
6. It lets you email in and out, publish to a weblog regardless of the platform. So keep your Blogger account and your WordPress account, and just post them out from here, spell checked and nicely formatted. Furthermore, it provides collaboration features, letting your international colleagues contribute to a piece of work with ease.
7. For me, it is also pretty fast, even with my huge files.

Yes, I like ZohoWriter a lot. There are some clever chaps behind this splendid tool. A couple of days ago, I started using ZohoSheet as well, an online spreadsheet application that works along similar lines. This seems pretty good as well, although I don’t intend to use that very much. ZohoWriter works so well for me that I’ve just signed up to use the ZohoOffice beta, a catch all application that could be likened to Outlook I suppose, pulling emails, calendars, contacts, tasks, document sharing and even the Writer and Sheet applications all together in one place. Do I really need such an application? Well we’ll see. At home, both of us are working between two computers – one Windows, the other Linux – and with my ability to set up a network seriously lacking, it seems like quite a useful tool. Though, naturally, I’m keeping local backups of my work – let’s not place too much trust in these Ajax Super Heroes just yet.

Whatever happened to ThinkFree? A week or so ago I found out that they’ve improved their sign-up facility, and at last I was able to give it a go. Too late. I find it sluggish, even in quick edit mode. I wouldn’t even go near power edit. It all looks very nice indeed, but it took almost five minutes to download the application into the cache before I could even get started, and even then it worked too slowly. I forgot what I was going to write. Never mind. I guess the marketing will sell some people “the best online office on earth” – but for me, I’ll settle for the best office online. Thank you Zoho.

But enough of that. It’s time to actially get some writing done, now that I have all the tools I could possibly need.