August 21st, 2007

Zoho takes the first step towards offline apps

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 5:23 am

Categories: Software, Web Apps

Tags: Google Inc., Google Gears, Step, Zoho, Marc Orchant

Zoho announced early this morning that they’ve taken the first steps toward making Zoho Writer available as an offline app using the Google Gears tool. Initially the docs saved offline will be read only but full offline functionality is planned.

We are taking our first steps towards offering Zoho Writer offline. With this update, you’ll now be able to access all your documents offline (Mac or PC) in read-only mode. We will offer offline editing capabilities in the coming weeks.

Zoho Writer Offline capabilities is based on Google Gears. Many thanks to Google for a great open source project. We plan to support and contribute to this project.

A new commenting feature has also been added. A video showing the offline capability is available in the blog post announcing the new features.

August 17th, 2007

iWork '08 - no Office killer 'cause it's not supposed to be

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 7:12 am

Categories: Apple iWorks, Mac, Mac OS X, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Productivity, Software

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Office, Apple Inc., Apple iWork, Marc Orchant

I picked up a copy of iWork ‘08, the new update to Apple’s productivity suite, the other day and have been noodling around in it since I installed it on my MacBook and my wife’s iMac. It’s a worthy upgrade for two principal reasons in my opinion: the significant improvements made to Pages (document processor) and the addition of Numbers, a new layout-oriented spreadsheet application. I’m not going to do a full, feature-by-feature review here – there’s plenty of those already on the tubes. I just want to address the notion that this signals some throwing down of a gauntlet by Apple in front of Microsoft. It doesn’t.

I thought we’d gotten past this but apparently not. Even venerable tech journalist and unabashed Apple fan Walt Mossberg fell into the trap of trying to compare iWorks ‘08 to Microsoft Office calling iWork “elegant but wimpy”. It’s a bad idea because they’re simply not the same thing. Walt goes so far off track as to slam Apple for not including an Outlook-like PIM in one sentence and them almost immediately points out that, well, Apple really doesn’t need to make an Outlook clone because, well, they already have a very nice set of applications for e-mail, calendar, and contacts built right into every Mac they ship. So why, oh why make bones over this. Why not just say so?

This, my friends, is a classic case of fomenting controversy where none needs to exist.

iWorks is not an Office “killer”. In fact, if you take Apple at their word, that’s never been their intent in producing the suite. According to a very lucid quote in an analysis piece at MacWorld from Apple’s Rob Shoeben, the raison d’etre behind iWorks is pretty simple:

“One of the things that you’ll see in some of our materials is, ‘Productivity the Mac way,’” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of applications product marketing. “That means, ‘I bought a Mac on purpose. I bought into the idea that things should look right and be well-designed and really easy to use.’ They want to enjoy the way they work, they want their work product to look great, and [they want to be] fundamentally integrated into iLife. If you buy into all that, that’s going to be appealing.”

And if you don’t, because you need (or want) the compatibility and feature full Microsoft Office experience then you go buy Office. Office:Mac is a decent product, if a bit long in the tooth. Even though the new Universal Binary Office 2008 for Mac has been delayed until sometime next year, the current version works pretty well. And it’s very compatible with it’s cousin on Windows. If you want compatibility with Office and don’t want to go the Microsoft route, you still have options. NeoOffice, a Mac-friendly version of OpenOffice is available at the nice price (free). You can also use ThinkFree Office which comes in both web-based (free) and desktop (commercial) flavors and will soon offer real-time sync between documents in the cloud and on your desktop with their Premium offering (disclaimer: I’m an adviser to ThinkFree).

It is what it is – a decidedly different approach to constructing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets nicely integrated into the Mac OS experience. Gee. Thinking different. From Apple. Go figure.

Update: Thanks to the MacWorld review of Pages I just learned that the Track Changes feature in the new version is compatible with the MS Word feature of the same name. Because Apple does not make this clear in their marketing messages or the small manual that comes with iWork ‘08, I assumed it was a proprietary approach to change management. This is huge for me as that’s one of the gating factors for me preventing me from seriously considering using Pages in more of my work. Sweet!

August 16th, 2007

Worldwide Skype outage - updated

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 9:42 am

Categories: Web Apps

Tags: Skype Technologies S.A., Outage, Marc Orchant

Update 2: Friday morning and Skype is down again. Fellow ZDNet blogger George Ou thinks there may be a DDOS attack in play based on a recent, publicly released exploit but Skype’s official announcement refutes that. I had service most of the evening yesterday with intermittent outages but I’m not able to infer a lot from that.

Update: Service appears to be restored as 5:25 pm MDT.

I’ve been unable to access Skype all day and it turns out it’s not just me. User from around the world are reporting the service is down and impacting personal and business communications for potentially millions of people. There’s not a lot of information available at this time. Here’s what Skype posted on their blog earlier today:

Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologise for the inconvenience.

As of this writing – 10:40 am MDT (GMT -7), service is still not restored. Here’s hoping whatever te cause is gets discovered and dealt with quickly. Skype has had performance stutters from time to time but this is the first global outage I can recall since I first began using the service and it’s bound to undermine the confidence many people have had in their availability and viability as a replacement for a conventional land line.

August 15th, 2007

Skype release 2.7 beta for the Mac

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 7:21 am

Categories: Mac OS X, Mobility, Productivity, Software, Windows

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Skype Technologies S.A., Beta, Marc Orchant

Skype has just released a beta version of Skype 2.7 for the Mac with Chat groups, Address Book integration, auto-redial, improved file transfer, and more. Downloading it now. I live in Skype – it’s my office number and preferred IM and video chat environment. I also use Gizmo Project (especially on the Nokia N95 and N800) and a number of IM clients but the bulk of my contacts and friends are on Skype so that’s where I look first. These enhancements will make it all the more useful and bring things more on a par with the capabilities I already enjoy when working on the Tablet PC.

August 14th, 2007

Musings on Gnomedex and evolution

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 5:12 am

Categories: Events, Web Apps

Tags: Event, Blogging, Conference, Twitter, Marc Orchant

So a funny thing happened this week. After 4+ years covering events and blogging about them live, I attended Gnomedex, the Blogosphere’s Conference, this past week in Seattle and I didn’t blog a thing. More about why below. Gnomedex is an event I’ve always wanted to attend. I’ve known Chris Pirillo for years and finally met him and his wife Ponzi in person in 2003 at the first MSN Search Champs event. Every year Chris asks me if I’m attending and every year I’ve had one bad excuse or another for not attending. But after last year’s event – a watershed moment in this conference’s history – I resolved to make it to Gnomedex 7.0 no matter what.

How I got there is a long story – the short version is I made reservations while working full-time for a startup software company on the West Coast and by the time I got to Seattle last week I was engaged in working with a decidedly different, established, and successful software company based on the East coast. One of the big goals in attending Gnomedex 7, as it turned out, was to share with a number of my blogging buddies and software industry friends what I’m engaged in doing these days.

If you’re the type that reads disclosure pages, you may already know that I’m consulting with Curl, Inc., a company I first learned about this Spring at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Jnan Dash, a good friend of mine, has been engaged with them for a few months in planning their relaunch into the North American market. He excitedly showed me the technology they’ve developed, born in the fertile ground of MIT in the mid-90’s, for developing and delivering Rich Internet Applications (long before anyone had uttered the three letter acronym RIA).

Today, we’ve officially announced I’m working with Curl to design and launch a Developer Center and to cultivate a community of developers and information architects looking for a way to deploy enterprise-grade applications over the web. Curl has an impressive list of customers in Japan who have built more 300 of these applications, used by tens of thousands of people in organizations whose names are very familiar – companies like Toyota, Panasonic, and others. You can learn more about Curl at the company’s web site and on the Curl blog where I’ll be a contributor. InfoWorld just gave Curl 5.0, the current release, a stellar review and called it “the best development language you don’t already know”.

So back to Gnomedex and why I didn’t do any event blogging. The content was generally quite engaging and ranged from marvelously entertaining (Guy Kawasaki) to poignant (a bedside chat with Gnomedex community hero Derek Miller who’s battling cancer) to controversial (Jason Calacanis whose presentation ignited a very public argument about conference etiquette). When it was on, it was riveting. Between (and during) sessions, there were any number of ad hoc conversations going in the hallways and side rooms and in multiple channels online.

The thing that really jumped out for me was how integral the Twitter stream during the event was to my (and many others’) participation. I did not attend South by Southwest when Twitter had its breakthrough moment but had been using it even before that event and have used it at all of the conferences I’ve attended this year as a way to locate and engage with others at the event and to discuss the goings-on with people unable to attend. But what happened at Gnomedex was on a completely new level. Rather than hanging out on the IRC back channel, I spent almost all of my time on the Twitter “front channel”.

The real-time commentary and analysis was dramatically different from the often anonymous and frequently trollish commentary on IRC. And many of the people I follow and who follow me on Twitter were engaged in the proceedings in a way I’ve never experienced before. With a UStream live video feed and the Twitter stream, people around the world were “there” in a delightfully “in the moment” way. So whether the moment at hand was the standing ovation given by the audience celebrating Derek’s heroic spirit or the spat that erupted between Calacanis, Dave Winer, and others in the audience about conference spam, there was a meta-dimension of discussion and commentary that was something like watching Bloomberg or CNN.

I think the way we interact with these events, whether we’re onsite or participating from a distance, just underwent an evolutionary leap. I can’t wait to see how this trend continues to manifest itself in the coming busy season for conferences that, for me, continues next with the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and DEMOFall 2007 in San Diego next month.

August 8th, 2007

Media Temple offers iPhone Account Center

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 6:50 am

Categories: Mobility, Productivity, Web Apps, iPhone

Tags: Apple iPhone, Web, Media, Media Temple, Marc Orchant

Media Temple is my hosting provider for my new personal blog and a few web projects I’m currently developing. This morning, they announced a web-based control center specifically designed for the iPhone that allows customers to manage their accounts, add domains, reboot servers, pay bills, and more from the iPhone from a very Apple-esque UI. It’s one of the best designs I’ve encountered to date for the iPhone and provides an anytime, anywhere portal for me to manage my (mt) account.

If you’re not familiar with Media Temple, here’s their self-decription from their About page:

(mt) Media Temple, Inc. is an industry-leading, privately held, profitable web hosting and software application services company based in Los Angeles, California. Since 1998, our company has provided businesses worldwide with reliable, professional-class network environments to host websites, email, business applications, and other rich media content. We are a friendly, accessible group of “technology agnostic” engineers, support professionals, and business developers focused on the continued financial success of our company while adding value to the services we provide.

I particularly like the “technology agnostic” statement. It aligns well with my personal opinion that the tools we have to choose from today, – Windows, Mac OS, or Linux – are all highly evolved, mature, and useful. It comes down to personal preference, experience, and what kind of work (or play) you’re interested in accomplishing.

What impresses me most about Account Center for the iPhone is how well the folks at (mt) have captured the touch screen experience. Out of all of the iPhone-focused web apps I’ve tried, this one looks and works most like the built-in applications on the device itself.

August 7th, 2007

SpeedFiler 2.0 for Outlook - faster and smarter

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 11:30 am

Categories: Mastering the Inbox, Microsoft Office, Productivity, Software, Utilities and Add-Ins

Tags: Microsoft Outlook, Version, Claritude Software, Marc Orchant

Claritude Software has announced version 2.0 of their SpeedFiler add-in for Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007. This utility makes processing and clearing your inbox a much less onerous chore and the new version adds a few welcome new features and a blast of performance tuning.

SpeedFiler replaces the built-in Move to Folder command in Outlook with a much more powerful version that word-wheels to a selection of matching folders as you type. It’s an intelligent agent in that it learns from your behavior which folders you’re filing into most frequently.

Here are the notable enhancements in version 2.0:

• File most incoming messages with a single click.: SpeedFiler analyzes your messages, and predicts where you want to file them.
• Auto-file original messages when you reply: File your outgoing replies and the original messages in a single action.
• Improved Folder Selection Dialog: The ranking of matching folders takes into account the match quality and your past behavior.
• Load Time Reduced by Almost 100%: SpeedFiler now scans the folder tree in the background, so there is no longer a delay when Outlook starts up.

SpeedFiler is available in two version - Standard ($24.95) and Pro ($39.95). A feature comparison can be found on the Claritude site. Upgrades from version 1.x are $14.95 and $24.95 respectively. If you need to process a lot of e-mail and value an empty inbox, this is a utility you ought to take a look at. It’s saved me countless hours of time.

August 5th, 2007

Vista IE7 issue remains unsolved for many users

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 9:54 am

Categories: Productivity, Software, Vista, Windows

Tags: Microsoft Windows Vista, Marc Orchant

When I read stuff like this, it confirms my belief that there’s something very broken in the world of Vista. Here’s a very knowledgeable user and talented developer who’s confounded and befuddled by a well-documented and still unaddressed issue affecting Vista users running Internet Explorer 7. The problem manifests itself as an annoying and increasingly frequent hang or time-out during which the PC is essentially rendered useless. This is not a productivity enhancing experience folks. This is a huge time sink. The emphasis below is mine.

I updated some of the drivers on the Toshiba the other day so maybe that’s what’s going on. I know there’s a specific order these drivers need to be installed in or else “things can go wrong.” What those things are I don’t know. Maybe that’s the problem I’m running into. The only cure I understand is to do a clean install and there’s no way I’m going to set aside a dozen hours to reinstall everything and get this machine back in order. I’d rather limp along until I find another Tablet PC. Right now I have my eye on a Lenovo with dual digitizers and the forthcoming Dell Tablet PC.

Sorry in advance if this doesn’t align with your experience and you’re a huge fan of Vista for whom everything is working just fine. IMO, this is yet another indication of how far Microsoft has to go to get Vista to a position of equivalent performance and stability to what we’ve come to expect to from XP SP2. Again, this is not an isolated incident or a case of PEBKAC*. Problems like this are all too common and are being widely reported and discussed in the tubes. Do a search and you’ll see what I mean. It’s increasingly evident that Vista is not a ready-for-prime-time operating system yet.

* A lovely acronym favored by tech support people which stands for Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.

Update: my buddy Ed Bott takes me to task for using weak evidence and he’s right that a lot of hits on a search engine from a query like the one I suggest is hardly conclusive. And, as I commented on his post, there are really two issues here. One is an IE7 problem that further investigation reveals is affecting users of XP and Vista. The other is the larger issue of whether Vista is ready to be a shipping product for the millions of people who were led to believe that their late-model PC was Vista-compatible or Vista-ready and have since discovered that this is not the case. If, as Ed argues in his post, the best scenario is Vista installed on a new PC at the factory and upgrades even on Vista-compatible or Vista-ready machines are a problem waiting to happen, then Microsoft needs to come clean and say so.

August 2nd, 2007

Microsoft delays Office 2008 for Mac until... 2008

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 6:46 am

Categories: Mac, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Software

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Corp., Marc Orchant

Jim Dalrymple, reporting at MacWorld announced the following news from Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit:

Microsoft will delay the release of Office 2008 for Mac until mid-January 2008, representatives of the company’s Macintosh Business Unit announced Thursday.

The long-awaited Intel-native Office, featuring programs such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage, was originally scheduled to be released later this year. Instead, Microsoft said it hoped to release Mac Office 2008 to manufacturing in December, which would allow it to release the product at the January 2008 Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

This is bad news for those of us who need some of the advanced functionality in Mac Office to collaborate with folks in the Windows world. Track Changes, in particular, is a compatibility issue that keep from from switching off Microsoft entirely on the Mac. It’s so commonly used in the work I do that I simply can’t afford to rely on another suite or set of products. I was pretty excited about the changes I’ve been hearing about in this next release but I guess I’ll just have to continue muddling along with Office 2004 on my MacBook a while longer.

That, or I need to just bite the bullet and use only Office 2007 in Parallels (serious overhead) and just remove Office 2004 from the Mac. Once Leopard arrives, I plan to reevaluate my Bootcamp thinking and may ultimately end up partitioning and dual-booting. Or I may just throw my hands up in abject defeat and do this kind of work on my Tablet PC and forget about everything-on-one-PC scenarios entirely.
I’ve already found a solution for cross-platform, work from any device, online/offline productivity for less complex documents and where the use of Track Changes is not mandated. I’ll be posting about that sometime soon, once the software/service I’m using is officially announced.

I know that Office is a big complex product and I’m sure there are legitimate reasons why MBUmade this decision but I’m increasingly feeling like Microsoft has some deep-rooted issues they need to address. More and more, it feels like everything they produce has a very good likelihood of slipping from its announced ship date. That does not bode well for them in the long run. The impact on SOHO and SMB customers is significant. The implications for Microsoft’s relationship with the enterprise is potentially catastrophic if they cannot hit their dates and provide a reasonable level of predictability.

UPDATE: On the virtualization front, VMWare has announced that Fusion, their Mac OS product will be released on August 6th for $79.99 (same price as Parallels). Between now and August 5th, you can pre-order Fusion for $39.99. You’ll get a license key instantly which can be used with the Release Candidate currently available or you can wait until the official release is available next week. Either way, it’s a sweet deal from a longtime leader in the space.

August 1st, 2007

The Vista productivity debate rages on

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 8:53 am

Categories: Productivity, Software, Uncategorized, Vista, Windows

Tags: Microsoft Windows XP, Tablet PC, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows, Marc Orchant

Well I seem to have hit a nerve (or struck a chord at least) with a lot of people with my recent post about the decidedly mixed reaction to Vista. It’s the most heavily trafficked and commented post I’ve made here at ZDNet and reading through the comment thread reveals a few interesting topics of conversation. Aside from the ever-present Linux (or Mac OS) vs. Windows comments that are a staple of any contentious thread here in ZDNet-land, the actual issue I hoped to address – productivity – was well covered along with the historical perspective suggested by more than a few commenters that things were not so different when Windows XP (or Windows 2000) were first released.

I don’t pretend to be a historian where such things are concerned but I can say with no reservations that my personal experience with both Win 2K and XP was nowhere near as disappointing or frustrating as what I’m going through with Vista. I recall that when Windows 2000 was first available, the company I was working with at the time had a mix of NT Workstation and Windows 98 SE machines and the upgrade was a huge improvement in both performance and stability. There were, of course, the Service Pack releases that continued to improve things (well, at least until the last one which was a freaking nightmare that we mostly avoided as we had already moved on to XP).

Windows XP was a big UI change – hold the Fisher-Price jokes please – but was also a significant change in the interaction design dimension as well. I remember being very excited about the improvements to the shell experience when I first dove into XP and, despite the changes in Vista, many of those core ideas live on. XP Service Pack 2 was a watershed release in my opinion. As a Tablet PC user, the updated Tablet PC bits in SP2 were a smashing success and made that form factor more than a curiosity and “cool but I don’t really need that” feature set.  The way Windows updated and protected itself was also radically changed during this time.

Getting back to the original topic of discussion, all of these releases made me feel more productive which, to date, Vista really has not. As a number of commenters noted, it seems that many of the decisions made related to how controls work and where they were moved to were made more for the sake of change than a comprehensible improvement in user experience.

It’s also all too easy to send Vista into a weird fugue state simply by getting a little “mouse happy” and trying to perform too many operations quickly. The system almost always recovers once it’s caught up with all my clicking but it’s distracting and irritating to see all of my windows dim out and watch that spinning circle thing spin around and around. And no, there’s nothing that’s in any way less than up-to-date about the system I’m using Vista on – it’s a recently released and well-configured Lenovo ThinkPad X61t Tablet PC with 2GB RAM, a big hard drive and a Core 2 Duo processor.

The jury’s still out and I have no doubt that ultimately many of these issues will be resolved with the now-rumored performance releases and ultimately a SP1 release sometime in the future. Right now? I’m still wrestling with very mixed feelings.