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Earlier today Corel announced a new product by the name of [WordPerfect Lightning][1]. Lightning is a available now as a public beta for Windows (Vista and XP) and will apparently be free even when it hits the 1.0 mark.
Corel is trumpeting Lightning as a "missing link" organizer for office suite users looking for a quick, lightweight way to organize, collaborate and create documents incorporating both text and images.
If you're a WordPerfect user Lightning offers tight integration with Corel's flagship product, but for anyone else Lighning may leave you wanting more.
Lightning is extremely lightweight, coming in at only 20MB and as its name implies it's fast.
The main interface is a Windows Explorer-like tree view that can be organized using folders and projects.
In addition to the main window, Lightning has a Viewer mode and a Notes tool.
The Notes tool is where you can paste together text snippets and images to create and organize your thoughts. Creating new notes is one button simple and from there you can paste and format text to your liking.
The Viewer mode handles outside documents that you'd like to group with your Lightning created Notes.
In my testing was Lightning's PDF support was much faster than Adobe's Acrobat Reader, but in the processes of installing the app Lightning decided to set itself as the default app for PDF documents without asking, which I consider downright malicious.
In addition to PDFs Lightning can also preview a number of other office suite formats such as Microsoft Word's .doc files. Unfortunately the new .docx format is not yet supported, but Corel says thy hope to include .docx support in the near future.
The downside to Lightning is that you can't actually edit anything in the Viewer application (probably why the call it Viewer) and there's no easy way to open a .doc file in another application. The cursor will nevertheless blink and tease you into thinking you can edit the document. The best you can hope for is to highlight the document text and send it to a new note, but be prepared to lose any complex formating.
Lightning also supports online syncing and sharing. The web storage is hosted by Joyant and a free account gets you 200MB of storage, a calendar and the ability to share documents with one other free user. For more serious collaboration you'll need to pony up for the $15/month subscription fee.
Syncing with Lightning is a simple one button process, but the simplicity comes with a price -- lack of control. You can either sync to or from your web documents, but there doesn't seem to be a way to synchronize individual files while leaving others untouched.
Frankly Lightning's features are wanting even for a free public beta. Lightning is too obviously an up-sell tool for WordPerfect and Joyant's server storage to be a truly compelling piece of software.
[1]: http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1171405162003 "Corel WordPerfect Lightning"
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