Online applications may yet have their day, though the examples seen so far have been less than inspirational. Buzzword, an online word processor created by Virtual Ubiquity, is now part of Adobe, since the American Big Boy bought the company.

The principle of an online word processor is that you download a small application which runs within an Internet browser, downloading parts of itself as needed and saving documents on a Web server rather than the local machine. This is the paradigm Buzzword follows, using a slick, white-on-black interface.

It opens to a single menu bar at the top, with a slide-along set of ribbons below that and a blank, white document. Each ribbon is connected with a particular kind of object that might be needed in a document. The font ribbon offers seven custom fonts, including Adobe's Garamond, in a good range of sizes and styles and in a set of co-ordinated colours.

Paragraph options give you justification, leading, indents and before and after spacing. 'Bulleted' and 'numbered' are the only two list types and the image ribbon offers only image insert, though you can resize images once they're on the page. The table ribbon enables multi-column, multi-row tables where you can control the width and height of columns and rows, but nothing much else.

Comments are designed for group working and one of the advantages of Buzzword is its easy exchange of documents via the server, so you can work collaboratively. To this end, a history bar at the bottom of the screen shows who's been editing the current document recently. A spell checker (US English only) and word count are also included.

These are the basics of any word processor and in Buzzword they work smoothly to give a clean, modern interface, which should be easy for just about anybody to learn. One of the key advantages is that once you've registered on the Buzzword site, you can call up the word processor and all the documents you've created, using it from any PC that has access to the Internet and supports Flash (the application is written in Flash).

The advantage of Buzzword's availability over the Internet is also its disadvantage. Infrastructure restrictions can slow it down, though these won't be as apparent on a machine with a fast broadband link. Things like adding pictures to a document can take an age, because you're uploading them (using the slower speed of your ADSL link) to the Buzzword server. Even re-opening a document with embedded pictures can be slow.

This is the best attempt yet at an online word processor and it's easy to see how convenient it could be to sit down in front of any Internet-linked PC and continue with work you started in another place. When 4Mbps or 8Mbps links can be guaranteed anywhere in the country, it will be truly viable. Adobe calls this version Buzzword Preview 6 and the application stands a good chance of being a leading player, if this mode of work catches on.