Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

gwoffice

GWoffice (Google Web Office) is an application that integrates Google Docs (now Google Drive) with the Ubuntu desktop, providing basic synchronization support for offline use. From its interface you can create new documents and edit or download existing documents.

Since, like the name says, this is an office application, it only syncs documents and doesn't work with other file types, at least not for now.

The application comes with a beautiful, clean GTK interface, supports HUD and comes with Unity badge and progress bar support as well as quicklists that lets you easily create new documents. Furthermore, the editor is themed according to your current GTK theme.

There's also Unity drag and drop upload support (drag and drop files onto the GWoffice Unity launcher icon to upload them), which for for now doesn't support all file types (document files like .odt, ods, xls and .doc should work for example) because according to its developer, the application is written for the Ubuntu App Showdown contest and it's only allowed to use packages available in the Ubuntu 12.04 official repositories, and a newer version of libgdata is needed for a fully working upload system.


gwoffice

From its preferences, you can choose to download all documents automatically and resync on startup - the downloaded Google Drive files will be saved in the "gwoffice" folder in your home directory.

There's no preferences entry yet, but using Dconf (under org > gnome > goffice > ubuntu-style), you can set Gwoffice to use an Ubuntu-style toolbar with monochrome icons, when using Ambiance / Radiance themes or to always use an Ubuntu-style toolbar:

gwoffice


The application is only two weeks old, so there's still work to do, but it looks very promising already. If you want to try it out in Ubuntu 12.04 or 12.10, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tombeckmann/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gwoffice
Report any bugs you may find @ Launchpad.

Also see: Grive: Open Source Google Drive Client For Linux