Watch Your Language!

Buzzword's first step toward internationalization is a small but important one: we now have spell checking dictionaries available for some 19 Western European languages. This means that if you're writing in, say, Danish you no longer need to turn off the automatic flagging of misspelled words. You can just click on the new Spell Check Language choice in the Document menu, and pick the language with which you'd like to use to check your spelling.

There's another subtle and elegant way to pick your spell check language. If you have flagged words in your document, just hover over the flagged word count at the bottom of the Buzzword screen, click on the document's current language dictionary and voila - the new language pick list appears.

We realize this is just a first step - there are many more languages to support, and many additional ways we need to honor the complete native language experience in Buzzword - menus, error messages, documentation, etc. However, we're thrilled with this new capability and hope it will make life a little easier for our writers on or from The Continent.

Invitations Extended

We've heard and noticed that sharing Buzzword documents is sometimes difficult - most often due to the need for you the author to send invitations via email to your collaborators. Emails get lost, flagged as spam or sometimes your collaborators just don't have access to email at the time when you want to share a document with them.

One of our concerns was a kind of document spam - we didn't want our users to be besieged with unsolicited and unwanted documents in their organizers. So we required email invitations to be sent to any "new" collaborator in Buzzword - that is, anyone with whom you hadn't already shared a document.

Now, Buzzword has a setting that allows "unknown" authors to share documents with you. In fact, now by default documents can appear in your organizer from anyone. To change this setting, go to Settings & Preferences under the Buzzword menu, and uncheck the option that reads, "Automatically accept sharing requests from unknown users."

There are a few other conveniences in there - for example, we now reveal your collaborators' email address when you hover over their tile in the collaborator bar at the bottom of the screen.

Export Open Documents

We've learned that there's a vocal and active community of folks who use Open Office, and all its various derivatives. Many of these people are interested in moving to Buzzword, but have been reluctant or unwilling as long as we didn't provide a way to more easily migrate their documents (and also to preserve copies of Buzzword documents as ODT files for safe-keeping).

With this current release, we've gotten part way there: you can now export Buzzword documents to ODT format. We realize the urgency in adding the ability to import - after all, that will encourage more Buzzword usage. We're actively working on ODT import - bear with us.

Keep the Faith

Generally, we're continuing to crank on new Buzzword features. We can't promise six-week turnarounds on each new version, but we're committed to regular updates so stay with us and watch as Buzzword grows.