Having lived abroad for a while, I appreciate some Buzzword features that are very convenient when communicating with people outside of North America. Just properly spelling European names is helpful. Call me traditional, but if your name is Siân or François, or Sinéad, for example, then that's how I want to write it. But it's very hard with a lot of systems out there to do that. Buzzword makes it easy.
We are very excited to announce the release of a new version of Buzzword that adds support for other languages. You might recall that our last release enabled choosing languages other than US English for spell check. With this new version of Buzzword, we now offer you the ability to choose French, German or even UK English as the language to be displayed in Buzzword menus and dialog boxes. C'est très bon, n'est-pas?
This post looks at some of the ways in which PDF files can be used with Acrobat.com. In addition to offering the ability to create five PDFs, there are a number of ways that Acrobat.com helps you work with PDF files.
(Dr. Ice is currently the Director of Course Design, Research & Development at American Public University System. He has been using Buzzword in his teaching for the past year, and has conducted extensive research on the impact of using Buzzword versus alternatives.)
In the traditional online classroom students complete papers and projects in Word and submit them to the instructor as an email attachment. When the project is collaborative in nature, the typical workflow model involves using the track changes and commenting feature. At the point that a project is deemed complete the changes and comments are removed and passed to the instructor, via an email attachment, who adds yet another layer of comments and markups.ﾠ
In the spirit of web 2.0, an alternative to the above process has emerged in the form of free, online document editors. Buzzword, Google Docs and Zoho are some of the best known products in this sphere. A core function among these is the ability to create a document online and invite others to view and / or collaborate. Other features vary by product and include the ability to include tables, images and other fundamental features found in Word. However, the means of editing vary significantly from product to product.ﾠ
In four online, graduate-level, education courses students (n = 78) were asked to submit group projects using Word and Buzzword in alternating fashion. Buzzword was selected from the available online document collaboration tools as it offers several unique features, including pagination, intuitive media editing mechanisms and a visually oriented sharing mechanism.
This might go without saying, but let's say it anyway: at Buzzword, we're interested in making things look good. This interest applies not only to the application itself, but also to the final product that the user creates using the application. Bearing this in mind, imagine our delight when our PR team took a document we'd finished together in Buzzword and redesigned it, returning with the following:
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Note: The widget used here is from Acrobat.com's Share; we copied the embed code directly from Share, and inserted it directly into this post. Feel free to flip through and read the file.
...WHAT?! We were thrilled with the results, but also intrigued: how did they do that? Although we'd love to claim responsibility and say it was all done in Buzzword, that's not exactly the case. Here's the full story.
[Today's post is authored by Andrew Greene, the developer responsible for bringing a host of new languages to Buzzword.]
We at Buzzword have always realized that the first two “W”s in www stand for “world-wide,” and we’ve been looking forward to the day when we could provide spell-checking in languages other than the dialect of English used here in the U.S.
One of the advantages of being a part of Adobe is access to a lot of world-class resources, including the spelling dictionaries that Adobe has licensed for use in our desktop products. With this week’s upgrade to Buzzword, we are pleased to respond to the many requests you’ve sent in asking for spell-checking in more languages.
The Buzzword team has delivered again - a mere six weeks after our last version, which appeared as part of the Acrobat.com launch in early June. We're very excited to be back in regular release cycles, and we have lots of great features planned (see Lisa's recent blog post for specifics).
This new release (our 10th in 14 months) has a few very important new capabilities, designed to broaden our appeal globally and to make it even easier to share documents.
There are myriad different opinions on what the best conditions are for reading text on a screen. Debates rage about whether or not to use serif fonts and how long a line of text should be. A surprisingly sensitive issue, and possibly without a clear resolution.ﾠ
Here we've tried to delineate a few of the more widely accepted tips on how to optimize readability. Although they can be forsaken in the name of personal style, they're generally considered the most conducive to easy reading. Here are a few key points plucked from various takes on the subject:ﾠ
The second Acrobat.com podcast again features a discussion with David Coletta, and includes the following topics:
Buzzword design process
• Feedback email as source for new features
• Visual design and functional specifications
• Designer-developer interaction: how to interpret static designs
• The value of a good spec
• Buzzword excellent for writing specs
New feature discussion
• Focus on reducing speed bumps, improving the invitation process
• New language dictionaries
As a recent addition to the Buzzword team, it's become part of my task to do some research about good document design and what it means for a document to look good. To that end, this blog will be the sometimes venue of a few document-crafting ideas that we run into. These posts could be design-related findings in areas we think are important (such as online readability, layout or issues related to font choices, etc.) or they could be ideas for how to use Buzzword tools to make super good-looking documents.
There will also be a case study or two—that is, we'll bring up a few examples of documents made with Buzzword and walk through the creation process with an eye towards Buzzword's role in the work flow, from inception to finished product.
For now, to whet everyone's appetite for document aesthetics, here are a few innocent diversions to get you thinking about the visual elements of a page:
ﾠThe Web is a wonderful place; it never stops. Buzzword continues to do frequent releases. The challenge is to keep up with the many and varied requests we receive. The team truly likes to hear from our users - your comments and ideas keep us focused on what's important and give us new points of view.
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Buzzword has come a long way since we first launched the Preview. And there's still a lot we want to do. Here's a look at some of the features that are on the drawing board - some are ideas that came from many of you (thank you!)
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More writing tools:
* As one user wrote to us, "Named styles, named styles, named styles." This is one of the most frequently requested features and it is high on our enhancement list
* Tools to track changes made by each co-author
* Justified text, in addition to left, right and centered text
* Import and export of Open Document format (ODT)
* More fonts (please see the posting on why there is a small number of fonts in Buzzword)
* Table enhancements - merged cells, more formatting options
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Organizing your documents:
* Folders for grouping and organizing your documents
* Tagging documents for search
* Search within the organizerﾠ
And more:
* Spell check dictionaries for languages other than US English
* An off-line version of Buzzword
* and many, many more smaller enhancements
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The Buzzword team has been releasing new features on a regular basis since our debut last summer. Our users get the benefit of new functionality as it's ready. Each time you sign in to Buzzword, the latest and greatest is there - no installations, no upgrades, it just works.ﾠ
Please, keep the dialog going. Tell us what you need and what you think would make Buzzword a better solution for your work. The Buzzword forum is open!
In a world too full of very ordinary software products, its nice to find one occasionally that just does its job very well, with a feature set that has all the stuff you want and is not cluttered up with stuff you don’t, and perhaps most importantly, an interface that is intuitive and clean so that it can be used without any real learning curve.
Kim Cavanaugh and Lee Keller of Palm Breeze CAFE offer three nice video segments, on YouTube as well as TeacherTube. In their reviews, which are targeted at educators, they point out the value and potential of using Buzzword in educational settings - for students submitting assignments, or for teachers to check in on their students’ writing process
We heard about a Buzzword user recently who happily created a document on-line and after getting through the first draft, he promptly exported the document to a Word file and sent it to his collaborators as an email attachment.
One area where Buzzword has been very popular is in educational settings. We had hoped for just this scenario when we first conceived the product because academia is where you find users who:
* Write a lot
* Write from multiple locations, often on different computers
* Write together with fellow students
* Share their work with reviewers (often teachers)
* And, finally, care about the quality of the writing experience and the printed output.
Because Buzzword documents are stored on the web, it’s easy to allow others to read, review or even co-author them. You don’t have to email your documents to others; just invite collaborators to your shared document, and you will all be working on the same version.
It couldn’t be easier to start using Buzzword - the sign up process takes about 15 seconds. Just go to www.buzzword.com and click on the “Sign Up” link in the upper right corner of the screen, then fill in a few fields and get started.
Buzzword is often compared with Google Docs, so it might be useful to discuss the relationship between them - both the similarities and the differences. The short version goes like this:
Similarities:
Free web apps. Buzzword and Google Docs are both driving the move to on-line applications, and are rapidly gaining popularity and market share.
Comments and Collaboration. Ubiquitous access to your documents enable better collaboration, and both tools have useful commenting functionality to support this.
Differences:
Layout and Pagination. Google Docs has the sophistication of Notepad, with no page payout or pagination capability. Buzzword, on the other hand, shows a true and accurate representation of the page in real time.
Experience matters! Buzzword’s user experience is rich and elegant, rewarding users and encouraging authors to write more.
A while back, a young marketing professional visited our humble offices to inquire about opportunities. After getting a thorough demo of Buzzword, she stated in no uncertain terms, “It’s lickable!” We didn’t really have an opening for a marketing person at the time, but her comment has had a lasting effect on us.
We have frequently heard reactions like that since. Of course, it’s gratifying to hear such euphoric praise and we all think our designer, Robby, is worthy of every syllable.
Here’s another way we think Buzzword might be useful in working on documents, whether you’re working alone or in a group setting. One measure of whether this post might be useful for you is the number of paper clips that are visible in your Inbox.
In other words, if your Inbox is choked with messages that contain attachments, especially if those attachments are Word documents, then Buzzword is worth considering.
It almost goes without saying these days that when there’s collaborative authoring and editing work to be done, email is the channel that supports the process. We have become so accustomed to emailing documents around, that we have become generally inured to just how hideous the process can be.
Disruptive innovations often initially result in worse performance compared with established products and services in mainstream markets. But disruptive innovations have other benefits. They are often cheaper, simpler, smaller, and more convenient to use. After taking root in a simple, undemanding application, disruptive innovations inexorably get better until they change the game, relegating previously dominant firms to the sidelines in often stunning fashion.
–Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovators Dilemma
Since Monday’s press announcement of Adobe’s pending acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity we’ve seen a storm of coverage by analysts, bloggers, and the press. Most of it has been extremely positive and encouraging. And it’s resulted in our servers being bombarded by what used to be called “The Slashdot Effect”. Only in this case it’s the total blogosphere/press effect.
We'd like to think that Buzzword represents a new application category that could be called Rich Collaborative Authoring. Though this isn't a popular buzzword, and probably never will be, it explains a niche that Buzzword fits nicely and one we think is important.
Let's start with the basics: writing has always been a killer app. However, Rich Authoring goes farther than basic writing by allowing for more expressiveness and polish. Here you have more ways to express yourself than plain text, including graphics and other media. You also have more control over the look of the final product, including layout, pagination, spacing and typography.
Word and similar desktop applications are essentially the only tools that currently enable Rich Authoring. This involves providing a rich canvas through which users can express themselves, supported by a page / typography engine that structures and lays out one’s content. But Word is essentially desk-bound, so collaboration becomes a manual and often awkward process.
We'd like to use this space to describe some of the usage scenarios that we think would be addressed and improved by a rich, on-line authoring and collaboration environment.
Our expectation is that the task commonly known as "word-processing", though constantly maturing, is in the early stages of a dramatic evolution. Migrating the authoring environment on-line isn't just about moving the same feature set to a different environment; more importantly, it's about exploiting the capabilities of the new platform to better suit what users are trying accomplish.
We've designed Buzzword for people who a) write a lot; b) need access to their documents and tools in more than one place; c) collaborate with others when writing by soliciting comments and peer editing; d) do not have an IT department supporting their computing environment.
And, very importantly, we designed Buzzword for people who care about how their documents look.
Word processing is the most-used of the desktop office applications and those of us on the Virtual Ubiquity team have been in that business for a long time. Some of us have built word and text processors for Lotus, Atex, Interleaf, Trellix, and Texet. Others have worked on collaborative software like Notes, eRoom, and QuickTopic.
And we've all used word processors like Wang, WordStar, Word Perfect, Lotus Manuscript, Volkswriter, PFSWrite. But, my guess is that many reading this have heard of few of these.
There's a reason for that - word processors live and die with their platforms.
