RefreshingApps.com

Textflow is a Swedish start-up developing a product for people who collaborate on Microsoft Word documents. They have released the first incarnation of their desktop AIR application, there is also an online version powered by Flex.

I must admit when I first started the application I was a little lost as to what it was for. It isn’t a word processor. I got asked to drag a Word document onto the application. Firstly I was on a Mac so I didn’t readily have a MS Word document to hand. Then there was no new menu item or icon, or on closer inspection any text tools like you would expect any word processor to have. On an initial inspection you could not do a lot with the app.

The site says:

Collaboration has never been this easy. Parallel word processing helps you produce text faster and use feedback better. To see TextFlow in action, watch the 1 minute video presentation and don’t forget to sign up for the beta

So I watched the video and read the associated blog post. So if you to work on multiple copies of the same Word document separately between users you can drag them all into Textflow and it will guide you into making the correct document merges. Sounds simple enough and it does a good job.

You can try it out online first or you can download a set of test Word documents that you can play with on the AIR version.

It makes light work of analysing many word documents and highlighting the results, something that would take an age by hand on large documents.

The feedback / bug submitting side of Textflow is another well thought out concept. It will take a screenshot of the app and send any associated session data along with it. There are also three questions already in the text area for you to answer, guiding the user for more accurate feedback.

Looking at the company information on Crunchbase, it looks like they are working on possibly integrating with Google docs and the export of other formats.

Design Eye

The introduction vide is a good idea and much needed given the slight initial confusion. I would like it if they had the tutorial blog posts condensed into an initial ‘getting to know Textflow' introduction that would guide new users if required.

The actual compositing window is really well coded and kind of works how you would expect. Although the whole app looks like it could do with a good designers input to give it a bit of life in the way of a new theme and colours. Just looks and feels a little dull.

Technical Eye

The TextFlow AIR' application is built using Adobe Flex 3 including custom component work in ActionScript 3.