We just rolled out an important update to Zoho Writer. This update includes two important features. Offline support & Comments.

Offline Support:

We are taking our first steps towards offering Zoho Writer offline. With this update, you'll now be able to access all your documents offline (Mac or PC) in read-only mode. We will offer offline editing capabilities in the coming weeks.

Zoho Writer Offline capabilities is based on Google Gears. Many thanks to Google for a great open source project. We plan to support and contribute to this project.

In Zoho Writer, you'll now see 'Go Offline' link on the top. Clicking on the link for the first time will prompt you to install Google Gears. Once the installation is complete (and your browser restarted), click on 'Go Offline' to make your documents (both personal and shared docs) available offline. By default 15 documents are downloaded to be available offline. You can change the options by clicking on the down arrow beside 'Go Offline' link to download more documents. To go back online, click on 'Go Online' and you'll be redirected to the online version of Zoho Writer.

Once you download your documents, you can access them @ http://writer.zoho.com/offline whenever you are offline.

This brief video talks about this functionality.

Comments is another useful feature we rolled out in today's update. You can now add comments within the content of your document by clicking on the new comment button in the toolbar () or just right click and select 'Add Comment'. When a comment is posted, it is shown with a comment icon (). Multiple users can add comments making it a discussion as you see below.

Clicking on the comments icon on the status bar () shows all the comments inside the document.

Do give these features a try and let us know what you think.

Also, we plan to add another useful feature to Zoho Writer next week....any guess on what that would be?