Desktop Two-Point-Oh

What the world really needs is a Web 2.0 Word Processor. I don’t mean something tacky and horrible that runs in the browser, but something that you can blog from. Something that organises your photos and sends them to Flickr. Something that lets you manage your personal web site, and something that doesn’t look like it’s fresh out of 1995.

I don’t care what anyone says, OpenOffice.org is ugly, it’s too slow, and handles like an ox. The interface is non-standard on any platform you care to run it on, and the only thing going for it is that it’s Free Software. Replicating the MS Orfice look is going beyond a joke especially on Linux where you’re dealing with an operating system that thrives on ingenuity.

Abiword is faster and lighter, and has a charming GTK interface that blends exceptionally with Gnome, to a lesser extent with KDE, and not at all with Windows. It has its own file format, only supports OpenDocument through a plugin, and has the greatest of interoperability troubles. It’s still my favourite word processor for typing up plain old text, because it’s small, fast, and pleasing.

There’s a whole handful of word processors, but the problem with most the offerings for any platform, is that they’re all designed for the corporate user. The person at home wants to express themselves with graphics, and share their creations. At the moment, all we’ve really got to interact with others are things like MSN and Myspace, both of which are horrible, proprietary, non-standard platforms that nobody can really build upon.

The “2.0” trend on the ‘net is something that I think has to be embraced on the desktop, to stop this nonsense about the “choice of operating system becoming obsolete”. Nobody wants to have to open their word processor or email client in their web browser, but they do want to be able to access their documents and email everywhere. What’s the solution, then?

The solution’s not really so simple, but eventually it will have to involve a person’s desktop following them seamlessly around via the Internet. I’m thinking web apps would be cute too; native to your operating system running like XUL apps do these days on Firefox. In the mean time it is too much to ask having a pleasant word processor that damn well supports open standards, starts in less than a second, and has XMLRPC support to publish posts to your blog?