Working inside the Web

With Web-based applications on the rise, we're doing more and more of our work inside our Web browsers. Internet Explorer continues to bleed market share as browsers like Firefox and Chrome continue to innovate, but the real sleeper in this space seems to be Opera.

A product of Oslo, Norway-based Opera Software ASA ( www.opera.com), this free browser has always been worth a look, but never more so than in version 10.

Here's why: The design team behind this browser consistently produces interesting ideas that wind up influencing its rivals. Speed Dial is one of them, which in Opera works by giving you a set of thumbnails of your most commonly visited sites when you open a new tab. That's handy, though hardly a show-stopper (you'll also find it, for example, in Google Chrome), but it's only one of the features incorporated into Opera 10 that tweak the browser for usability.

I work with tabs constantly, and find the ability to open up different Web pages and have them available for continuous viewing (in tabs like those on folders in a file drawer) to be essential. Opera 10 lets me drag the tab bar down, opening up thumbnails of all my tabs or showing me particular tabs when I hover the cursor over them.

Two new toolbar buttons also appear in Opera 10. The first is a "rewind" button that takes me to the first page of whatever domain I'm visiting. A "fast-forward" button takes a guess at what page I'll be looking for next, but in my experience its guesses are often inaccurate.

The Opera 10 user experience is aided by a "turbo" feature that compresses Web pages for those with slower connections. This is aimed, I would imagine, at dial-up users but should also work well in settings with iffy WiFi connections. A clean RSS preview is a handy addition, and so is the ability to take notes keyed to specific Web pages. I'd hate to see browsers start to become as bloated as word processors, but these are handy features that don't detract from what is a usable and cleanly designed alternative to the more familiar competition.

TextFlow is an interesting Web-based word processor, an editing tool that allows you to manage multiple documents at the same time. Using Adobe AIR to provide a seamless user experience, TextFlow taps both your desktop machine and Web resources. It's aimed at solving a thorny problem. Suppose you've farmed out a document and asked several people for their thoughts on revision. You get the documents back with each person's suggestions, but now you have to find a way to pull them together, accepting some changes, rejecting others.

You can try to do this with Microsoft Word, which can compare two documents easily enough, but things get more complicated with a larger number of documents. TextFlow can handle this task and lay out the results in a logical structure. You can merge the multiple documents into a single version on your screen, with the suggested changes from various editors appearing in different colors. The software computes the variations between the versions and tracks changes on the sentence, paragraph or overall structural level.

As you make individual editing decisions, it's easy to click on a change to accept or reject it, with the results instantly applied on-screen. TextFlow can work purely as a Web application (try the test drive, which operates this way), but downloading the desktop software gives you greater flexibility, including the ability to drag and drop files from your desktop or folders elsewhere on your PC. The software is free for personal use.

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