My earliest creative writing on the computer was done on the Vic-20 and later the Commodore-64. Saving most text to those flimsy but friendly 5 1/4″ floppies. Later when I moved onto the PC one of my early favorite word processers was WordPerfect and I graduated to 3.5″ and then the hard drive. I remember being amazed at how much writing would fit on my first hard drive and how fast it would read/write. Of course my first hard drive was a fraction the size of most thumb drives these days. Progress!

For my various creative writing endeavors WordPerfect just felt right. Somewhere along the line I fell out of sorts with WordPerfect and moved to competitor Microsoft Word. These days I prefer using OpenOffice Writer for longer docs offline and Google Docs for shorter docs online although I do have one license of Office 2007 waiting for a thorough testing on our new Vista machine.

Today I came across my old friend with a new face, the Corel Wordperfect Lightning Beta which promised:

- a Notes tool for word processing, note taking and copying text and images from email and the Web
- a Viewer to open PDFs, WordPerfect and Microsoft® Word documents
- a Navigator to organize your ideas and documents
- a free online account with 200 MB storage

After signing up to download (yeah, I don’t like that either), I downloaded and installed the app. Uh oh, the pitch at the end of the beta:

Argh (what was I thinking?) I don’t need another offline/online notetaking app. CNET took a stab at telling me what I was missing:

Navigator serves as a central repository for organizing content, while the Viewer acts as a reading tool to view such documents in Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, or WordPerfect file formats. Lightning Notes is designed as a lightweight word processor and note-taking utility. And Connector, which is powered by Joyent, is a suite of Web-based applications such as e-mail, calendars and address books.

Pass.

I really don’t like how after downloading the ‘free’ beta of something I’m being default checked into installing a free 30 day trial of the full Corel Office meal deal. Maybe I’m just cranky today after lunch. Tell me more about what’s cool in the comments below if anybody else tries and finds some redeeming qualities. Uninstall.

/me waves goodbye to an old friend. Lightning indeed.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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