Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
Category: Adobe
, Flash, Office
Adobe has announced it will release a web edition of Photoshop. Yes, it will almost certainly be Flash based, not pure Ajax (technology aside, it’s the logical choice for the owner of the Flash platform!). Still, it’s big news for anyone involved in rich web apps…it wasn’t long ago when people would cite graphical editors as a typical example of what not to webify. Today, we already have several web-based image editors in production, and today’s news means we will soon have an official web edition of the best known desktop image editor.
Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe Systems plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months, the company’s chief executive said Tuesday. The online service is part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com.
Software publishers have often produced free or inexpensive “lite” editions. Now, it seems, Adobe’s plan is to use the web for a lite edition and continue using the desktop for the full package. It makes sense from the user’s perspective, as the web is an ideal, low-barrier, platform for trying out an app. On the other hand, you have to wonder about the engineering effort involved in maintaining dual editions - maybe this is where technologies like Adobe’s Apollo come in, to let you share code between desktop and web.
Chizen said Adobe laid the foundation for a hosted Photoshop product with Adobe Remix, a Web-based video-editing tool it offers through the PhotoBucket media-sharing site … Like Adobe Remix, the hosted Photoshop service is set to be free and marketed as an entry-level version of Adobe’s more sophisticated image-editing tools, including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Chizen envisions revenue from the Photoshop service coming from online advertising.
Adobe’s announcement comes a few days after Google introduced its premium Google Apps service, charging $50/user/yr for companies to use Google’s various Ajax tools, and Adobe is upfront about the impetus for this new initiative.
The hosted version of Photoshop is part of a bigger company strategy to introduce Internet-delivered services that complement its shrink-wrapped applications and head off likely competition from Google…”That is new (for Adobe). It’s something we are sensitive to because we are watching folks like Google do it in different categories, and we want to make sure that we are there before they are, in areas of our franchises,” Chizen said.
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
Category: Business, Calendar, Email, Google, Office, Showcase
From the You-Know-When-Ajax-Has-Gone-Mainstream-Dept, Google announced today it will be offering businesses a premium service for its key productivity applications, at $50/user/year. The package includes:
- Access to office-style applications - Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator. No presentation package yet - perhaps Google should acquire S5 :-).
- Access to communication applications - GMail (@your-own-domain), Google Calendar, Google Talk (voice/IM).
- Access to Google Homepage (maybe corporations could deck this out to become their intranet homepage?)
- Control panel to manage the domain
- Ads can be turned off
- Storage at 10GB/user
- Integration with organisation’s sign-on and email infrastructure
- Phone support
The apps themselves are available to anyone, but the integration and extra services come with the premium service. Google provides this comparison table.
The giant elephant in this room is your company’s data sitting on Google’s servers. In the absence of an “Apps Appliance” sitting inside the firewall, there will always be a major proportion of the market unwilling to commit to a solution like this - increased risk of data loss, theft, and manipulation. Google’s pure-external model keeps things nice and simple, but it’s not for everyone.
Zoho, for example, offers “in-premise edition” to run inside an organization’s network. Similarly, Zimbra’s collaboration app. It’s also becoming possible to make your own stack, with apps like Wikicalc and the various wikis, though nothing as comprehensive as Google’s offering. It’s feasible MS will move their apps in that direction too.
The comparison among these approaches will be worth watching in coming months. For now, though, it’s great to see how much Ajax and the web has evolved in the past two years, with Google providing a lot of the inspiration. From TechCrunch: “Beyond competition and concerns, tonight is a good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation that Google is as well. Its nearly full-service suite of sophisticated, integrated online services is something of historic proportion.”
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
Category: Business, Office
In CNN Money, Om Malik talks about the shift to online apps.
The browser is the new OS. Yes, we’ve heard this before, and if you’re quietly groaning right about now, I can understand why.
It’s been 10 years since a barefoot Marc Andreessen graced the cover of Time magazine and trumpeted how the browser would make the operating system irrelevant. By uttering the unthinkable, he brought the ire of Bill Gates down on Netscape. Now, Netscape as a Web powerhouse is gone and Andreessen is no longer a magazine cover boy. Yet his vision of computing through a browser window turns out to have been prescient, if premature.
Mobile will play a major role as well.
Things will get more exciting for entrepreneurs when we all start walking around with new Internet-ready portable devices such as the Nokia 770 Internet tablet or smartphones such as the Motorola Q and Nokia E61.
These pocket-size monsters with keyboards, luscious displays, and brisk 3G connections will soon replace laptops. All they need are browsers that can access Web-based software as easily as your desktop can. (I already use a Nokia E61 to help manage my website and write short blog posts from within the phone’s browser. Soon I’ll be able to run the whole site from my phone’s browser.)
If you’re a developer or startup, you are suddenly free to write a browser-based application and quit worrying about which operating system, chip, or device your consumers are using.
It’s a scary thought for anyone who built a business around proprietary formats. But for the end user, this is the kind of future that Andreessen on his best days - and maybe Gates on his worst - had envisioned.
It’s pretty clear that MS fended off the late-90s threat of Office-in-the-cloud. What’s not clear is whether Google, Zoho, and others will produce something compelling enough to attract the mainstream enterprise market away from MS Office. For one thing, any office product will have to ensure data is secure to gain serious market share, and that probably means a server appliance running inside the firewall. Strong compatibility with MS-Office formats will be another key factor.
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006
Category: Comet, Examples, IE, Office, XmlHttpRequest
In a recent post, I explain the difficulties of Comet (Streaming/Push) in IE.
IE makes it difficult for two reasons: (a) IE’s XMLHttpRequest component doesn’t tell you anything about the response until the connection has closed - even if you try polling it instead of relying on onReadyStateChange, you’ll still get an empty string (Try it); (B) Okay, switch to plan B and inspect IFrame content - we can’t rely on onload, which is only called once at the end, so we *must* poll. But no, polling won’t help either, as the IFrame content remains empty until (you guessed it) the connection is closed. (Try it).
Fortunately, there *is* a portable solution, demonstrated here.
The portable solution is this: Have the server continuously output script tags that call a known function in the parent frame. When you set the child IFrame’s source to point to this service, it will start evaluating the inline scripts as they pop out of the server.
Of course, none of this is really new, at least not to some people. Ajax pioneer Brent Ashley points out:
The ReadyState 3 issue that Michael talks about has been well known (well, apparently not well known) at least since Scott Andrew LePera described the problem in late 2002. It really needs to be fixed.
Hopefully, future versions of IE will expose the ongoing response while the XHR connection is still open. But until then, we at least have a workable technique that works across different browsers.
This area isn’t very well-documented; It would be good to hear what others have done to make streaming portable.
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006
Category: Office, Showcase
@Mail is a mail solution allowing companies to serve mail over a web interface. With the latest upgrade, @Mail has gone Ajax. Product manager Ben Duncan says:
Features include message-drag and drop to folders, emails retrieved from the server via XML and displayed on the Webmail interface directly via the DOM. Message cache support via Ajax is included, to avoid requesting the same data from the server. Live spell-check support for composing emails via Ajax for highlighting misspelt words.
Sign up for a demo at http://demo.atmail.com.
Friday, March 24th, 2006
Category: Business, Office
The much-publicised AjaxWrite is only the beginning for Michael Robertson’s push into Ajax. Further to the release a couple of days ago, here’s some info on their plans:
But ajaxWrite is just the start. We have a library of applications we have been working on to replace most of the standard PC software titles. Every week we will launch a new sophisticated program on Wednesday at 12:00 PST on http://www.ajaxLaunch.com. These programs will push the boundaries of what people believe is possible today with web-delivered software. These programs look and operate much like their traditional software cousins, but are cross-platform, loaded dynamically, and are available to users at no charge. I’m convinced if you try a few of these products you will understand how the software business will fundamentally change.
The Business 2.0 blog calls it an Ajax PC strategy. An Ajax appliance must be the next logical step :-).
Hopefully the “Ajax PC” suite will work for all major browsers. Alex Russell’s recent post takes issue with the fact that AjaxWrite belies its name by working only in Firefox, and graciously suggests that the xulwrite.com domain is still available.
Thursday, March 2nd, 2006
Category: Database, Editorial, Office
After four “When” companies got a chance to impress us with their Web 2.0 goodness, four “Make It Easy” concerns are now up to the plate: Dabble DB, Rallypoint, The Form Assembly, and Zoho.
Each company has eight minutes to present their wares. A panel (Michael Arrington, Rael Dornfest, and Krishna Akella in this session) and the audience give feedback for eight minutes.
Dabble DB
The co-founders are up talking to us about their Dabble DB service. It’s a hosted database for the rest of us. Business users know that spreadsheets aren’t the best way to store data, but they feel that databases are “scary.”
They showed a demo of taking a spreadsheet of information from an O’Reilly OSCON from a few years ago. The UI of Dabble DB lets you either import data to create a spreadsheet, or manually enter the data. They cut-and-pasted and CSV export from Excel, and they’re demoing a really neat ajaxian interface for the data — spreadsheet on the web.
They’re also showing ad-hoc queries against the spreadsheet interface, using a simple filter type interface both across all text or specific fields, and you can save the results of queries for later viewing.
They also have a calendar view of database data, where they parse out date-like values and plot them on a calendar — and you can apply the same searches against the calendar view, too. It’s a really fast, compelling interface — better than some of the When calendaring apps we saw in the last session.
They are also demoing schema changes. For example, they make it super easy to take a text field and change that to a lookup table relationship — something that traditional databases make painful, and they also make it easy to migrate other fields to the new lookup table.
They also export data to RSS, PDF, CSV, iCal, HTML, OPML, and text.
The audience was very complementary, and both Michael and Rael on the panel seemed impressed. A great product.
Rallypoint
The Rallypoint dude is talking about how hard it is to do effective collaboration in a team environment: you start passing documents around, you lose track of ersions, and before you know it, things are a big soupy mess.
Goal for Rallypoint: combine the features of a word processor with the collaboration features of a Wiki, tied together with an ajaxian user interface.
The demo of adding a new page shows off their word processor interface. It’s pretty much the kind of rich text editing we’ve come to expect from ajax apps without any dramatic differences.
The security features allow you to protect a page, allowing only certain users and groups to view/edit/subscribe to the page.
The versioning features weren’t shown, and there’s no way to export data at present, though they all working on an export feature.
The general consensus from the panel was: “This is a crowded space, good luck.”
The Form Assembly
The creator of The Form Assembly is up, talking about web forms, saying that many websites need web forms for various reasons (registrations, etc.) and up until now there hasn’t been an easy way to get them (riiiiiight).
The product lets you build forms and show reports based on the form data. The UI was pretty nice. I didn’t see anything revolutionary.
The product is free up until you get more than five responses to your form. After that you either pay as you go (12 cents per response) or you buy a $25/month subscription.
Michael Arrington: “Can I massage the data that users enter?”
Answer: There’s a junk filter for removing spam.
The panel thought the pricing was just way off but otherwise seemed to appreciate the product, though not enthusiastically.
Zoho
Wow, Zoho is a suite of business applications on the web: Writer, Virtual Office, CRM, and, err, more. They’re showing us Zoho Creator, which is for “creating web applications with no lines of code.”
(By the way, thanks to a crash, we’re able to see it was written using Java Struts. Neat.)
You can create applications either by basing it off a template, or creating a new one from scratch. So far, the application is composed of creating a web form.
The form creation is less visually impressive than the other form builders we just saw. In fact, once you actually start using the form you’ve created, the quality of the UI is quite primitive compared to the other Web 2.0 apps we’ve seen. There are some ajax features, but they look tacked on in a really cheesy fashion.
So, they’re done showing features, so it looks like “applications” are just web forms and tables showing the data entered in the web form. Neat. The table viewer of the entered data isn’t as impressive as Dabble DB but does have a few ajax features, like the ability to dynamically change the set of columns displayed, etc.
They showed us their on-ine spreadsheet for just a few seconds, and it looked really cool. I was tempted to think they were showing us an embedded Excel instance as the demo was in IE Windows, but I think it was a pure Ajax implementation. Geez, they also have an Outlook clone, too. So, some of the products look pretty cool but they didn’t go very deep.
Their vision is to be a complete, fully functional MS Office clone on-line. They let you import Excel and Word and other formats into their products.
Michael Arrington: “You guys have a reputation of copying others and being overly aggressive in PR. You need to change that.”
Answer: Some sort of muffled argument refuting the accusation.
Conclusion
There are a lot of really cool emerging database/form applications that make web-based form applications really easy to create. Dabble DB rivaled desktop database front-ends in terms of making it really easy to deal with data. Very cool!
Sunday, December 25th, 2005
Category: Office
InnerPhaze has a detailed
summary of the “Ajax Office” offerings. There’s plenty of info here on
features and pros/cons. He’s focused on the word-processing side, rather than other Office-y genres like Spreadsheets and Presentations.
gOffice:
“This website produces
high quality output with almost no effort in part because we are careful not to
provide too many options.” http://www.gOffice.com
gOffice has some interesting features like free text you can use as a template
to get you started on whatever it is you are writing. There are hundreds of
these entries from apologies to sales letters, and even creative writing. One
of the things I liked the most was that you can donate your own original text
to the Free Text Library for others to use
ThinkFree
Office:
“ThinkFree Office is a suite of MicrosoftÆ
Office-compatible applications, which includes word processing, spreadsheet,
presentation graphics and file management software that all look, feel and
behave just like MicrosoftÆ Office. Additionally, ThinkFree Office is
delivered and upgraded over the Internet, giving users an unprecedented level
of computing choice and freedom.
- http://www.thinkfree.com/register.jsp
The first time you open ThinkFree Write you have to download a Java applet,
which can take a minute or two or three. It is supposed to be faster after this
point because the applet is cached on your local machine. It does get faster,
but not as fast as the strictly web based word processors or even the desktop
word processors … There are a lot of good things about this service. sign-up
is easy, you can save to Word, OpenOffice and pdf … Overall the minor
glitches are far outweighed by what ThinkFree offers in terms of features, ease
of use and polish. And although it is a bit slow at the start-line it is very
robust at the finish.
Writely:
“Writely is not a carbon-copy of existing desktop solutions. Rather, Writely is
an innovative, Web-centric word processor that leverages the connected nature
of the Internet to provide online storage, editing, sharing and communication
of documents
- documents that users can now upload and save in multiple formats.”
href=”http://www.writely.com/View.aspx?docid=afmc9ph7txv2″>(Writely) Source
page
Writely is the hottest web word processor out there right now.It has many
great features, a clean interface, and is very responsive. They are adding
features all the time, and just recently added Save as a PDF feature, but as a
paid service … Overall Writely is a great service and I think it deserves the
buzz. I just hope they keep the main service free.
Zoho Writer:
“… an online Word Processor to Create, Format, Store & Share Documents
online.” -http://www.zohowriter.com/Home.do
Overall I am very impressed with Zoho Writer, it is very close to Writely
already in terms of features, and (like Writely) will be adding features all
the time.
37Signals’ Writeboard:
“Writeboards are sharable, web-based text documents that let you save every
edit,
roll back to any version, and easily compare changes. Write solo or collaborate
with
others.” -http://www.writeboard.com/
There are nice features, like being able to keep all the revisions of a
text, collaborating with others, and subscribing via RSS, but overall this
could be more closely compared to Notepad than Word. If you just want quick and
simple this may be right for you.
EyeOS:
“EyeOS is a free, cross-platform Personal Content Manager System based upon the
style of a Desktop Operating System. The base package includes the whole
Operating
System structure and ten apps, as a Calendar, a File Manager, a Text Editor, an
Internal Messenger, a Browser and a Calculator.
EyeOSs is thought to provide a complete, scalable and free (GPL Licensed)
Organization and Work System. Its scalable, so everyone can port an existing
PHP
app to EyeOS and create a meta-package for installing it.” (from
http://www.eyeos.org/index.php?section=Whatis
(R)ight now you need your own server with PHP 4.2.0 or better to host EyeOS
… The word processor in EyeOS is called EyeEdit and is described as a text
editor, but it is really a full featured word processor, (much more feature
rich than Writeboard for example) … Probably the neatest thing is called
EyeApps, which enable you to download and install programs into your EyeOS.
