Following up on my recent review of Web-based office productivity suites, Adobe wrote in to let me know of an omission. As it turns out, Acrobat.com isn't just about generating PDFs, as you might expect; it's also host to a growing number of Web applications, including Adobe's own online productivity software. I gave it a whirl and found it intriguing, if a little lackluster at this early stage.
Like Microsoft's Office 2010 Web Apps, Adobe's offerings are still very much works in progress. Only the word processor component is officially launched. The spreadsheet and presentation components are hosted on the Acrobat.com Labs site, and so far they're really just demos -- you can't import or export finished documents, for example. The applications aren't well-integrated, and they don't feel much like a suite.
[ Find out how Microsoft Web Apps, Google Docs, and Zoho matched up in InfoWorld Test Center's review ]
What sets them apart from the competition is that they're all based on Flash, rather than plain HTML and JavaScript. This means their UIs are slicker, smoother, and more animated than the others I tested. Menus slide and bounce around, progress bars pulse, and custom cursors twirl. That might be your bag; personally, I found it to be a whole lot of UI for such basic functionality.
Buzzword, Adobe's word processor, is comparable to the others I tested. Support for Microsoft Office documents is mediocre, as I've come to expect. Otherwise, you have access to the usual range of basic text-formatting capabilities, albeit with the aforementioned animated UI. Be prepared to move the mouse if you use this app, because keyboard commands appear to be nonexistent. (See Buzzword screen image.)
