So I know the name is silly, but it seems to me there's a chance that Google Docs & Spreadsheets could become, in its next iteration, one of the most essential tools out there.

All that's needed is a small downloadable desktop client or clients – slightly richer local versions of Writely and Spreadsheets – along with some background synching. Garrett Rogers noticed something in the Docs source code referring to a local host, but a) this now appears to have gone and b) it presumably referred to behaviour within the browser when a user is offline.

Scrybe promises to include cached offline editing within the browser, which is nice, but just imagine what could happen if you had a non-browser-based client. (One advantage being that a standalone application is more flexible: it can offer more print options, do footnotes, chapter numbers, complex layouts – that sort of thing.)

You'd write your stories on your laptop wherever you are – up your mountain, in your cave – and they'd be saved locally. Whenever you go online the documents you'd be working on would automatically be uploaded to Google Docs. Then you can access them anywhere from any computer, and work online or off.

This seems to me a perfectly practicable and probably imminent application of the Gdrive concept: the online copy, as that leaked slide said, is the golden copy; and your hard drive just keeps a cache. And I could live without the full Gdrive if it existed for word-processing documents and spreadsheets and whatever other elements of a Google Office are developed. I'd never have to worry whether I'd backed something up: all this would happen seamlessly in the background, and you could access your files from anywhere without ever thinking about it.

Having had my laptop stolen last week, and having lost quite a lot of work that I chaotically failed to back up, something like this can't come soon enough.

Sorry for the long post! But boy am I looking forward to it.

Yeah, I look forward to seeing more features in Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I also look forward to finally letting go of my floppy disks and USB flash drives.