ThinkFree Online Review

ThinSkin writes "ThinkFree Online is, simply put, Office without the Microsoft, a collection of free online apps that support and contain most features found in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. ThinkFree has just released a major upgrade to its features, bumping its online storage to 1GB for each user and adding a lightweight AJAX-based collaboration feature. ExtremeTech has an interesting review of ThinkFree Online's applications and features which reveals a lot to like about this improved webware and, while it may have its occasional quirks, can be great for those who want to edit and create documents on the fly."

Comments

Looks very nice

[remembertomorrow]

I wasn't really expecting much when I saw this article. "Yay, another 'web' application." I must say, though, that the screenshots accompanying the article are extremely impressive. I'm sure if you put both Microsoft Office and ThinkFree in front of a user (the secretary/receptionist where you work, for instance), they wouldn't even be able to tell the difference.

Even with today's high-speed connections, it is definitely faster to edit a document from a web interface compared to downloading and installing OpenOffice. I will be using this site when I am out and about and not near a computer with MSOffice/OOo.

Re:Looks very nice

[d_jedi]

Go to the site right now:
"The web site will be unavailable from 3:00AM to 7:00AM PDT on April 25"

this is exactly the kind of thing why web apps won't replace desktop ones.

Re:Looks very nice

[theStorminMormon]

That's like saying "a blackout!! that's why electricity will never replace oil/coal/wood!"

AJAX is still, in general, a nascent technology relative to industry-standard technologies. And if you're saying "web apps won't replace desktop ones soon" then I agree with you. But I don't agree that web apps won't replace desktop ones ever.

Given time to let both the internet continue to mature (the electricity grid is still more stable than the web) and to let web app companies mature, I think that web-based computing is not just possible - it's an inevitability.

-stormin

Re:Looks very nice

[john.wingfield]

I'm sure if you put both Microsoft Office and ThinkFree in front of a user (the secretary/receptionist where you work, for instance), they wouldn't even be able to tell the difference.

How sure? They work in fundamentally different ways. You're either saying that secretaries are so dumb that they wouldn't notice the difference between one "complicated" piece of software and another, or you're saying that they don't use the software in enough depth to be able to tell the difference. I think either argument is seriously off the mark.

Secretaries and PAs are your core users. If the software they use isn't up to scratch, you would soon know about it!

Re:Looks very nice

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Gmail has minor problems relatively often, although the last major outage that I can find was a year & a half ago (when it was in beta).

The GP has a point - a large business would be mad to trust their core business applications to a third party with so many potential points of failure.

Re:Looks very nice

[theStorminMormon]

If you'd been interested in understanding the point I was making rather than simply trying to "win" teh internet debatezorz you'd realize that the analogy is very apt. Sure, electricity is a public utility now, but did it start out that way? In the early years it was a private venture and had lots of bugs (like randomly giving pedestrians random jolts of electricity). And therefore it had lots of nay-sayers. (These nay-sayers, if they existed today, would be fighting the pro-electricity "fanbois" on le interweb.)

Really, if you think this is about ThinkFree you're missing the point. It's about a paradigm shift. I'm surprised that so many people who've lived through the incredible social changes of the internet, email, and personal computers fail to consider what changes may be yet to come. It's like people saying "email sucks! you can only send text! you can't sign it to verify who sent it, you can't include color, you can't send physical objects, like tickets!" Some of those criticims (inability to verify) will be solved, others (inability to send physical objects) are the reason we have email AND still have snail-mail.

It's the same with web-based computing. It's not a replacement for your stand-alone apps. It's a new service. I don't think it's perfect for everything. I can't see streaming Doom 3 to a thin client. But the advantages of web-based computing (e.g. making geography irrelevant just to name one) fundamentally distinquish web-based computing from client-based computing.

Whether or not one particular AJAX program is ready to replace Word 2003 (it's clearly not) is really beside the point. Really - you are a perfect example of someone who can't see the forest for the trees. You're so stuck on one particular example you're missing out on what's important.

-stormin

Re:Looks very nice

[ElleyKitten]

It might look nice to you, but if these guys are serious about being "web 2.0" and/or replacing Office then they really need to work on their accessibility. Even that offline message has two big accessibility no-no's: text-as-images, and table-based layout. I tried looking at that page with Fangs (screen reader emulator) and you know what it said? "thinkfree dash Internet ExplorerTable with one column and twenty rowsTable with one column and sixteen rowsTable endTable end" That's what a visually-impaired person would get from that website. That's it, nothing else. And while accessibility might not be important to you in your current situation, it's extremely important to anyone with a disability, and also to the public sector. All government web systems must be accessible, and until accessibility gets taken more seriously on these kind of projects, the desktop is going to win out every time.

I'm glad you posted that. It seems like no one cares about screen readers anymore, I guess they just don't think blind people use computers.

I turn off pictures when I web surf at work, because it's faster and I don't trust websites to show work appropriate pictures, and all I get on thinkfree.com is some colors and boxes. I wish web designers would just take the time to put some alt tags on things.

Re:Looks very nice

[popeyethesailor]

Whether or not one particular AJAX program is ready to replace Word 2003 (it's clearly not) is really beside the point. Really - you are a perfect example of someone who can't see the forest for the trees. You're so stuck on one particular example you're missing out on what's important.

Thin client platforms have come and gone; they made sense in an era where clients were not powerful enough, client software was terribly expensive(Do you know what an Unix license used to cost in those days?).

People have obscenely powerful computing resources at their hands. And there is a plethora of choices available in the software arena. Common software such as word-processors and spreadsheets are ubiquitous. Making geography irrelevant is totally irrelevant to this discussion. I can store documents created in my Word processor anywhere in the web. I dont need a fancy Ajax weblication to keep them accessible anywhere. Removable media is extremely affordable; I dont even need a damned net connection. Considering all these factors, this is a paradigm shift allright, but it is regressive instead of being progressive.

Online apps suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Businesses are never going to use them because of privacy concerns, plus they are unusable if you cannot get online. Maybe they have some other purpose, but as replacement for full blown office suites they are a joke.

Re:Online apps suck

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you've missed the point. Its not about relying on another company to provide "computational horsepower", but about your sensitive data going back and forth between yourself and the provider, and possibily even being stored on your provider's servers. Why do this when the current Office apps you use do not expose you to this flaw? Another downside to webapps is portability. Can I take my stuff to another vendor, and if so how easy is the company going to make that?

slashvertisement...

[MustardMan]

You know, if you are a part of extremetech, at least mention it in your summary. The writeup makes it sound like he just bumped into this site one day and found an interesting article.

Web Based Application

[Metabolife]

Am I the only one tired of seeing software moved onto the web? I can understand email, since it needs to be accessed everywhere, but word processing? With hard drives reaching the 750GB level, what purpose do online only application serve besides easy access? I also hear talks about whole OSs stored on servers where users have to logon. Guess what, if the server goes down, you are screwed. It's much better to just bring your laptop and keep a backup of current working data on memory stick just in case (Not that word documents are large to begin with).

Seeing as how Microsoft Office is faster compared to slim the competition, who wants to waste time with downloading online applications for home use? If you're on the road and need some documents stored on a central server you can easily use gdrive to store it. It just seems that everyone can't wait to have their entire computers stored by some big information gathering company.

Just my .02.

Re:Web Based Application

[miyako]

I agree with this. I actually wrote a rather long blog entry here about why I think a lot of web-based "web 2.0" applications are a bad thing (or, at least, not the best thing for the intelligent and creative people in computing to be focused on).
My main two points were that:
A: There are security implications involved with using web applications. Theoretically, a cracker, marketing firm, or government intent on getting access to personal documents would only have to gain access to a single server (or cluster) to get access to the documents of everyone who uses the service. Even if you delete documents, you have no way of knowing if the documents are actually deleted.
B: Moving things onto the web stifles innovation. While there are many interesting things that can be done by having applications communicate over the internet, instead of building on already mature desktop technologies, we are instead trying to do all of these things through the browser. While there are benefits to this, I feel that they are outweighed by the limitations of working on the immature and rather limited platform of AJAX/DHTML/etc. inside of a web browser. The best we could hope to accomplish over the next few years is to recreate on the web what we already have available on the desktop now- so we can write web applications in a few years that we could write for the desktops today.

Re:Web Based Application

[geo_2677]

Such an application may actually be relevant to organizations if they could buy the server software and host it for their employees on the network. It helps backup of important data, and the documents are always in the control of the organization. The organisation never loses the data. Thinkfree may be thinking on such lines for all you know. If they have proven technology then convincing corporations will be easier.

Re:Web Based Application

[hey!]

Not to disagree, but I think cogent counter arguments can be made.

A: There are security implications involved with using web applications.

You get these security implications anyway, the instant you hook a computer up to the net. Spyware. Adware.

Moving things onto the web stifles innovation.

Well, the difference between innovation and invention is up to the market. The key though is that users are not competent to administer their own machines; nor are the administrators in most small businesses. Given a trend towards smaller, more ubiquitous, more networked computing, you can imagine a world of stateless workstations with anything of value scrutinized, armored, and backed up by a professional datacenter staff.

I know people who, if they want to know what their web site looked like last November, just go to archive.org because it's convenient. If you never backed it up, it'd be a life saver.

Re:Web Based Application

[drachenstern]

To the GP:
Can I be second on your list?

Also, think about my position, I work nights and goto school during the day. Work doesn't mind if I work on my homework at nights, so long as it doesn't interfere with my job. This is rare. So the only limit is I cannot leave my desk to go work on my homework at some other terminal. So my options are limited to HPUXv11 and Mozilla/Firefox. I have 0 write capabilities for what it's worth, ie /usr/* or /opt/* etc, but about a meg home quota. So how can I work on my written assignments? Easy now. Before, vi, and hope I had time for formatting later. Now keep in mind I still work off of my jumpdrive, but not going to worry about setting up all the dependencies to try and get my 128 mb flash running all my programs for a limited term contract.

So think on that for a minute, eh?

Re:About time..

[Big_Mamma]

This isn't AJAX - It's java, embedded in a web browser. They are creating 'light' versions with AJAX, but what you saw is the full version, created with swing.

Trying to create anything as complex as an office suite with a clientside interpreted language, and html + browser as graphical toolkit is just plain stupid, imo. ThinkFree got the message, and used the right tools to do the job.

"The web site will be unavailable from ...

[Diomidis Spinellis]

... 3:00 AM to 8:00 AM PDT on April 25. We apologize for the inconvenience"

is the wording on a banner currently appearing on the thinkfree web site. Am I the only one feeling nervous about having my documents residing on an application service provider where their accessibility is beyond my control?

--
Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective (Addison-Wesley 2006)

Won't last once the Telcos tier the internet

[retrosteve]

Once the Telcos own the internet, how long will things like this be convenient to use?

All it takes is a golf game between Gates and a few Telco CEO's, and suddenly ThinkFree has really really low bandwidth. Really low.

I don't know if this is threadjacking or having the insight to connect two apparently unrelated issues. I'll let the mods decide.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

[gaijin99]

What is the primary reason why MS Word is a bad idea? Everyone here knows the answer: closed format. If MS decides to take their marbles and go home, your documents may be unrecoverable [1]. You don't put your critical information in a closed format, because if you do the owners of that format own you.

This is at least five million times worse because you don't even have the closed format documents yourself, they're stored on *their* webservers. They go down? You don't have your documents. They go out of business? You don't have your documents. They decide to cancel your account? You don't have your documents. Also, legally, are they even your documents? How does copyright enter into this, if you write something on their servers, which is stored on their servers, can you really claim exclusive ownership?

I cannot imagine a worse idea.

Hard drives are big these days, putting a word processor onto your computer is not difficult, nor even costly since OpenOffice is free. This system *will* go down, all systems do eventually, and when it does I will do nothing but laugh and say "I told you so, but you wouldn't listen" to the suckers who suddenly find their documents unavailable.

[1] Yes, I know OO.o can read Word format, currently. Who's to say what the next release will bring, no?

Thinkfree owners partying...

[Ilgaz]

After they announced "web" version again (1.0 was running in IE/MS JVM) the old timer thinkfree using people said "It is finally, really free".

You can't believe that joke for a not-so-popular poor java program. It was everywhere including mac download sites.

Joke? "If it is thinkfree, why it is not free?"

You would see thinkfree using people trying to explain what "think free" means endlessly.

I hope it finally ended... Oh wait, the downloadable version! OK, not giving further clue.

What good is an unavailable word processor?

[dpbsmith]

I was about to try a quick "reality check" test, namely seeing whether ThinkFree could properly render and edit the actual Microsoft Word document I am actually working on right now. Not a deliberate stress test, nothing very fancy, no equations, but, yes, some style sheets, some tables that would lose all usefulness if not rendered with reasonably high fidelity (including some shaded in boxes, some split and merged cells), and quite a few strategically placed manual page breaks, so the document will be more or less ruined if font metrics and margin settings aren't handled accurately.

The site says it's "unavailable from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. on April 25th."

Well, it just so happen I need to do some work on this document soon. (Actually, of course, I should be working on it right now instead of reading Slashdot).

Guess what? Microsoft Word is available from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. on April 25th.

It all comes down to privacy

[Daredevil73]

IANAL but speaking from a US centric view, any piece of information thats hosted on servers not within your personal control, is much more easily accessed by the government than documents on your own personal hard drives. The standard for personal search and seizure is much much higher than for a corporation. Recently lets take a look at Google and AT&T. Google handed over some personal information after mounting a defense, but they still handed it over. AT&T is just dumping all internet traffic to the government so get favorable treatment elsewhere. The more I hear the less like about these online services having so much personal info. I won't be using more than I absolutely need to.

Re:WHEN you get to look, look for lock-in

[TopShelf]

I don't care about the format, online storage is enough to keep me away. You may be able to save it in any manner you like, but why should the software provider have a copy as well? If MS was doing this people would howl like banshees.

Most features eh...

[suv4x4]

a collection of free online apps that support and contain most features found in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel

That's why reviews shouldn't be made by people who can't find the differences between WordPad and Word to save their life.

OpenOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll stick with OpenOffice thank you. Online app's dont work. Do you trust the net?

Your documnet, Ransomed

[pentalive]

It's still the case that someone else holds your document. That they can peek any time they want to. That they can show your document to anyone else they want to. They can loose your document, they can just prevent you from using your own document.

Oh you might have laws and agreements that are supposed to constrain them but employees can act badly. Possestion is 9/10ths of the law.