TextFlow, the visually stunning collaborative document editor we reviewed last November, just announced a major update today: online editing and back-end file storage offerings to augment its unique and easy to use Adobe AIR application. Prior to this announcement, TextFlow was limited to only being able to work with local files.
There are several key differences that TextFlow has from its primary competitors such as EtherPad and Google Docs:
- TextFlow is still an AIR application. If you were a TextFlow user before, nothing critical has changed in this regard. Most of TextFlow’s competitors are online-only.
- Although you can invite people to edit a document online, they basically get their own view of the document. Once they are finished editing, they would click share to push those changes back to the master document. In other words, this isn’t live collaboration.
- Collaborators that you send an email invite to will be able to work on a web-based version of TextFlow that just supports editing the current document.
Going back through the TextFlow blog, it appears that they have addressed our initial complaint of only being able to successfully edit limited document length files, as well as a number of Microsoft Word document compatibility fixes among other changes.
Overall, we think TextFlow is moving in the right direction, and sticking with a workflow idea that works really well with certain people’s method of collaborating on documents. TextFlow comes in a business edition at $99 per user/year and a free personal edition.
