As most know, my main online word processor is Google Docs, while I usually do my offline writing with Q10 and if formatting is needed, Open Office (while I’m at home). I’ve never really taken a liking to Zoho Writer as I didn’t like the layout much. Zoho Writer became a place for me to dump backups of my novel, "Keys to Twilight" when GDocs is being more inane than usual (*glares at GDocs*).

I’ve also recently discovered that I have a weakness to anything in the shade of blue. Not so much the pastel colours, but the shades. Solid states of blue from light to dark made me fall in love immediately (exception being clothes). This is quite dangerous especially when I’m on web. ([Edo], now you know the reason for my feedback ;p)

The same goes for Zoho Writer. They’ve just released Writer 2.0, and it’s done primarily in shades of you guessed it, blue. I still don’t quite like the tabs and the list of documents on the left so much, but with what looks like a larger editing space, I’m not about to complain.

The changes are a mix of Microsoft Word’s tabs (as mentioned by one news outlet) and an interface you’d get in GDocs. While the extra space on the left might be distracting to those with wide screens (I have no such thing, so I can’t test that out) compared to GDoc’s 85% Editing field, in my opinion this layout would be pretty good for someone used to working on a page layout.

When you’re saving, there’s also a nice large green bar on the top right to say that your document is being saved. It’s far less obtrusive and annoying to its previous position at the bottom right, where it could obstruct the end of the sentence while Autosave is happening. Word count now happens at the bottom, where they tell you how many pages, what version the doc is, when was it last modified, and other miscellaneous info.

I like that they retained their previous feature of having many documents opening in one window under different tabs; this was a problem I faced often with GDocs, because to open another document while I was working on another, I needed to go back to the main GDocs window and click on the new doc, which would open another tab. There’s also a search function in the document list to the right, making searching for documents a breeze now.

There’s just one thing I don’t quite like about Zoho. The inability to put in a special character (the apostrophe being one of them) in the title. My titles are wide and varied, and you know, it would be nice to have a title that says "Dreamer’s Kiss" instead of "Dreamers Kiss." Besides that, it seems that I may have an excuse to jump from Google Docs to Zoho Writer for real after this.

We shall see. I still prefer the simplicity of Google Docs’ layout but Zoho offers more functionality. Hmm..

Edit: Ooooo! Posting to my blog also generates a list of categories I use. This is FUN! 😀