ANALYSIS: Lightweight, free note-taking software can also work as a PDF converter for offline compiling of Web contentIs putting all your docs online and accessing them via Web 2.0 apps the answer to document management? Not if you don't have Web access.
Enter Corel and its new app WordPerfect Lightning, a free utility that's part note-taking software, part PDF compiler and part word processor.
As WordPerfect Communication Manager Greg Wood puts it, over the last year or so, the world's become "drunk with love" for Web 2.0 apps. Yet liking the tools and actually making them part of one's workflow are two different things, especially when the information you need is saved to a rat's nest of PDFs that fluster Web 2.0 apps and require heavy desktop apps to organize and access.
"This isn't something that's been lost on Corel," Wood says. "For the last little while we've been watching trends in the marketplace, trying to determine just how we could better deliver the benefit of Web 2.0 to computer users who continue to do a vast majority of productivity tasks on the desktop."
The idea behind the lightweight Lightning (currently in beta) was to incorporate features that make it one-third Adobe Acrobat, one-third Adobe Reader and one-third word processor that can make pertinent content—pertinent to your class paper, office presentation or next blog entry—accessible offline if you need it.
Or online, too. Corel Lightning hooks into Joyent, an online repository that avails itself of the first 200MB for free and then charges after that, offering syncing service to whatever PC a Corel Lightning happens to be using. The ability to toggle between online and offline use is key to Lightning's value, says Corel General Manager Richard Carriere, and eventually, the ability to collaborate with other users on the Web, and sync current versions of documents.
"If you take an office suite and put it online," he says, "I would argue that's not innovative, it's just a new distribution model that's not ready for prime time yet."
Lightning is a fascinating little tool because not only is it free, it's better than Google Docs because it sits on your hard drive and isn't beholden to your Internet connection, yet doesn't carry the price tag, unneeded features and hard-drive bulk of Word (or WordPerfect, for that matter).
Lightning also does some basic things that Acrobat and Reader do, without the price tag of Acrobat and the bandwidth required of even the free Reader, such as:
- picking up and moving around graphics
- allowing light text edits on pasted-in PDF content that retains formatting
- incorporating content from Microsoft Word or the Web
- viewing and printing PDFs
- organizing content of different flavors (HTML, docs, PDFs, e-mail)
In other words, Lightning might not make you uninstall Reader and Acrobat quite yet, but it might make you need them less frequently. For instance, instead of waiting for them to load once or twice a day, maybe you'll cut that down to once a week just to do some heavy lifting Lightning can't do, Carriere suggests.
What does Corel get out of hosting and supporting Lightning? Users switching from Word to WordPerfect X3, they hope, for more robust document organization, format, and publishing capacity—as well as things that can't be done in Word (without Acrobat) such as editing PDF content and saving back to PDF.
That switching-to-WordPerfect stuff is cool by me, because the current climate's a tough one for Corel: On one side, Microsoft's Battleship Office dominates the market, and on the other, OpenOffice and Google Docs offer free alternatives to WordPerfect. If Corel can coax enough users over to their side of the fence, it will help keep Corel solvent and coming up with cool little innovations like Lightning. That, in turn, will keep those blokes from Redmond and San Jose on their toes.
