Up until yesterday, I was a very active user of Writely. This was no particularly for the collaboration aspect of the service, though that was occasionally handy, it was just for making academic notes, and having the convenience of being able to access and edit them, securely, both at home and at uni. I have occasionally been known to blog from the application. It’s a really useful service, and I find myself using Microsoft Word less and less (though Writely’s not nearly advanced enough to replace some of the more technical and involved Word documents).

But this morning, I woke up to find that I was no longer a Writely user. I’m now a user of Google Docs and Spreadsheets. All the same functionality is there (and, crucially, all of my documents), but it doesn’t look nearly so pretty now the Writely green has been removed – and the amount of screen space taken up by the toolbars has increased. There’s frankly odd changes, too, like the spell checker now highlighting incorrectly spelled words rather than using the familiar wiggly red line, and the fact that you’re no longer prompted for a document title when starting a new document. There’s nothing disastrously wrong with the new setup, but the interface feels like a bit of a retrograde step for some reason.

It’s not so bad that I’m switiching away. But it would have been nice if the new interface had been trialled in a Beta of some kind before being forced upon me, maybe offering both interfaces over a transitional period, or even if I’d been given some warning that this was going to happen in the first place. I realise this is Beta software and liable to change or disappear at any time, but I’m a demanding consumer and expect Beta software (especially from Google, where almost everything is Beta) to evolve, not to wake up one morning and find everything completely different.

Anyway, I just thought all of that was worth ranting about.