Offline Support & Comments in Zoho Writer
Raju Vegesna August 21, 2007 04: 50 am
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?
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You guys are pretty amazing.
Now You Can Zoho Offline…
As much as I moved online I’m not naive enough to believe I’ll always have 100% broadband availability. Crazy shooters, limited conference availability, or just traveling to less covered areas (and I don’t mean here) - there will be t…
Thanks for choosing Google Gears for offline support.
Would you be interested in a quick video interview for code.google.com?
P@
Sure Patrick. We’d love to. I am raju at zoho dot com
I like it! Comments were something I really needed.
Guessing next… other languages spell checking?
This is really amazing. Are the comment also exported to Word or OpenOffice?
Sam
Free on-line alternative to MS Office - Zoho, now in on-line and off-line modes…
Free on-line alternative to MS Office - Zoho, now in on-line and off-line modes…
Thanks for a great product.
Unless I had other internet problems yesterday it seems that you guys took down the server to patch without giving users any notice. This can lead to data loss. Would it be possible to give users notice about when the servers go down?
Thanks
Geir,
Extremely sorry for the issue you have faced. The inconsistency may be due to the server switching that happen while patching up.
We will make sure we do a smoother update without affecting the User experience.
Ranjith
http://www.zoho.com
Hi Guys,
Thanks for the great products you make. The first time I ran across ZOHO I was looking for something to use between home and school and was REALLY amazed at how much work you have done. I am really enjoying VO also and am currently using the wiki to contribute with a friend over a book we are writing.
Keep up the great work!
This new feature is great. But, is there a way to publish the comments? When I publish a doc with comments in it all I see in the public page is a nice blue icon but not the comment linked to it.
Have I done something wrong?
Thanks Again for your work.
Cool!
I moved to Mac recently and get rid of MS products in my Macbook (still use Dell for the office). Pages of iWork does not work perfect with many .doc files and Zoho does.
Plus it is greate I can share between my personal and office notebooks the same docs online
Kiko : Thanks! We will try giving spell check for other languages soon
Sam : The comments aren’t exported as of now.
Mike & Alex : Thanks!
Yann : The comments aren’t published. The showing of the icon is due to a bug, sorry. We will fix this soon. UPDATE : This issue has been fixed now.
So when’s Google coming knocking on your door guys?
Its really amazing.Zoho has great products.
So how do I keep working on my doc when in offline-mode? Or is isn’t the offline-feature meant for editing off line? My desire is to keep writing when not in range of a wifi accesspoint.
Yep - funny thing - to base your app. on Google Gears. One would believe there was a competition between Zoho and Google Docs. What is the reason then?
“Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.”
And this has what to do with Google Docs being a competitor? Absolutely nothing.
Also, do you people not know how to read…
“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.”
View only mode right now, offline editing mode in the coming weeks…
But anyway, I just tired it on Linux with Firefox and it worked great! Zoho Rocks!
Thanks Brad. I should have mentioned about Linux support in my post.
Hi,
Zoho is realy great. I like this comments-feature.
Only the ‘publish’-option could be improved. Why only members can read (not edit!) the published docs?
ok, first check options conscientiously then post stupid comments.
sorry, it works.
Way to go Zoho! Keep it rolling!
I can´t edit my offline docs using my browser.
I look forward to editing offline, but it’s not essential for us right now or for the near future. Thinking ahead, will you have some kind of “synchronize online/offline” feature? and if both online and offline versions have been changed, thoughts on integration?
Looks good — I like this feature a lot and I’ll use it a fair bit.
Thanks.
assistemerson
When we offer offline editing functionality, we will offer Sync as well.
How exactly is “creating an offline version with read-only access” different from exporting a Zoho Writer document to html and saving it on your system?
Am I missing something…
Zoho is realy great,thank you!
Thanks for the great products you make.
is always being better, i believe will be more…
Ugh, I have to post this here because for some reason I can’t log in to the forums, even though I’m 99% sure my username and email address + password are correct…
Exporting a Writer doc to a Word doc > making changes in Word > saving changes to Zoho > closing Word > going back to Zoho then exporting back to Word has caused an insane number of problems for me. The first time I exported, there was a weird bug that caused random sets of two words to be concatenated together, causing hundreds of spelling mistakes in my 23 page document which I had to manually fix. Fine, whatever–I made the changes then saved it to Zoho, closed Word, went back into Zoho and tried exporting again–and now there are insane numbers of errors in the document (wherever I made any sort of formatting change directly in Word–but we’re talking minor stuff like adding bullets, bolding and italicizing). Most punctuation marks (hyphens, apostrophes, exclamation points) other than periods and commas are now weird symbols; half of the bullets are screwed up; and there are a bunch of other weird symbols in weird places and a few concatenated words.
I want to keep using Zoho Writer, but there’s no way I can if these types of errors keep happening; the added benefit of convenience Zoho offers is outweighed by the time and annoyance of having to troll through 23 pages of text fixing tons of errors.
Again, I like your product and want to keep using it… you guys are churning out products and functionality updates quickly, but it seems like your testing needs a lot of work, and if you don’t increase the quality you risk losing existing clients you’re working so hard to gain.
I can’t believe you created your notebook export in Microsoft IE export format. Why not use more universal standards? I moved all my friends from Google Notebook to Zoho and now I’m wondering if that was a mistake. More than 100 of us are all Mac based and this doesn’t work for us at all. Please consider using more universal standards so that users on other platforms can take advantage of your offering.
Thanks.
I am sorry to post this issue here, but not sure where else to place it. Like many folk, I am trying to use zoho on an iphone, and like many, I cannot get the keyboard to appear. The “solution” offered by a few of your users more often than not simply freezes the whole iphone. With great respect should you not withdraw the izoho until this is fixed? (There are other issues too - the welcome says “click on NEW in the top left hand corner” but there is no such word available on the screen (unlike on the desktop version).
Thanks so much
David : With iZoho, you can only view your Zoho files and not create/edit as of now. The solution offered in the forums is just a possible workaround and as said by the user there works only sometimes. We will have to wait for Apple to fix this issue (of recognizing the WYSIWYG editor and showing the keyboard)
Sorry about the ‘Click New’ dialog, we will remove it soon.
Keith,
Continuous round trips with Word is a problem area. We will continue to work on it to refine it.
Carl,
IE format is just one of many formats we intend to support. In this specific case, we could do this quick, so we rolled it out. But we definitely want to support standard formats, particularly PDF.
Sridhar
Fantastic work and fantastic product. How far will you be taking this offline concept? Will you be doing this for all the ZOHO Suite products?
Thanks,
Brad Nickel
Brad:
Yes, we do have plans to extend this to other apps too.
hello….currently i am doing my final project which request offline application to be appled in my project…i am facing a problem that is i don’t know how to implement it by using AJAX. plus i have no idea how to do offline updating and user can view the content of the web pages even through there is no internet connection..anyone can offer help for me? how’s google gear work actually? can i implement google gear into my project for offline application?
hi, i am also doing my final yeap project which require me to have an offline application to be applied as well. for now, i dont have much knowledge on how the implementation of offline application actually works. Anyone have a simple sample offline application which can help me thru this? pls i need help..
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I have changed my Zoho Sheet language to Turkish (just to test) and now I can’t change it back to English. I keep getting an error on the page. Would someone please let me what to do…this is really driving me crazy!!
Thx,
Marcy
Hi Marcy,
We have fixed the issue. Can you reload the page and try again?
Regards
Ramesh
It’s very good article. Great site with very good look and perfect information.
Good update to Zoho Writer !! Thx
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