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

Check the actual app out (in 2 1/2 hours)

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Think Free appears to be down for now, but at 7:00am PDT, you'll (apparantly) be able to have a look

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: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.

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

[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: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

What if...

[cultrhetor]

You actually have to do work when you have ... no connection? [Cringes and hides from constantly wired /.ers]

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?

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

[Young Master Ploppy]

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.

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.

Hosting your own

[The Bastard]

Looks like many comments regarding Internet accessability, ownership on someone else's servers, etc may be void. ThinkFree has both stand-alone desktop and internal server products. Pop this puppy on your own servers for intranet or VPN access.

Hosted, or with the option of implementing my own server. Hmmm...A Web 2.0 company doing it right.