Garett Rogers from Googling Google went sifting through the source code of the new Google Docs service that was just released late last night. He found a few interesting things, like always, but some of the code seems to indicate that an offline version of Writely may be coming soon. Here is the code that he found:
if (location.host.indexOf("localhost") > -1)
{
if (location.host.indexOf("Prefactor") > -1)
return "http://localhost:8180/Prefactor/" + page + paramString;
else
return "http://localhost:8180/Docster/" + page + paramString;
} else
return "http://" + location.host + "/" + page + paramString;
function RunningOnLocalServer() { if (typeof onLocalServer == 'undefined') return false; return onLocalServer; }
All of the references to localhost appear to be the key to the offline version. How cool would that be? I think that would be really awesome because everyone I know says that the online Office solutions aren’t usable on a daily basis since your documents can’t easily be taken offline.
On top of that Garett found some apparent interactivity with SaleForce.com and also a way to customize the appearance of Google Docs. I’m sure that users of Google Hosted accounts will be able to utilize the appearance customization in order to brand the services to match their company. These are definitely some very smart moves by Google that will help distinguish themselves from competitors.
They might, but I’d chalk this up to when people looked at the latest iTunes code and got all hard on the pants because some code said the word “phone” in it. Simple code that some writer put in to throw people off or as a feature that never panned out.
If they did release something like it, I don’t think it would pan out (unless it could upload directly to the docs servers). There’s openoffice, and that pretty much fills the needs of any MS office alternatives.
I’m sure that they would make it upload directly to the Google Docs servers and probably even synchronize the two if you desire. The stuff that Garett often finds in the code has a high tendency to show up a little bit down the road. The only question is how far down the road.