Slideaware - An intrusive online slideviewer Tuesday, May 08, 2007

I'm been a keen advocate of Slideshare since discovering it about 9 months ago. It's an incredibly easy way to share slide decks online and I've used it a number of times to publish presentations I've done such as Sex & the Investor, which has been viewed nearly 2,000 times.

My only gripes with it is that you can't password protect presentations to restrict who can view them, nor use it to run remote presentations, which is a great shame.

So, I was interested to see how SlideAware would measure up when I read that you could password protect your slides and run live remote presentations, all for free (premium service for $12pm).

However, the service fell at the first hurdle as far as I'm concerned - in order to upload presentations you need to install a toolbar within Powerpoint.

Now, there are several services I've happily done this for including Zoho's Office but they weren't mandatory, which meant I could try the service out first before deciding if I wanted to install a "permanent" feature inside my application.

It's a shame that a simple FTP upload facility isn't available which would have allowed you to go toe-dipping with the later option to install the toolbar once you learnt how great it was. I can't tell whether this is a technical restriction or a sales technique - they may think I will be a stickier user if I have the toolbar installed and that frivolous users will be deterred.

Guess I'll keep looking.

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posted by John Wilson @ 7:50 AM Permanent Link ,

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The Users that know more than IT Wednesday, February 28, 2007

It was never meant to be this way. IT was way too complicated for the users and that was the way IT departments liked it. "You pay us and we'll sort out this difficult stuff, just hand over the money and watch us do our magic."

Well, a combination of increasing number of IT literate users and available online services are starting to challenge this arrangement. When the guy paying the bill knows as much as the person providing the service, or at least enough to ask the right questions, the balance of power shifts back towards the user. When the user can declare UDI when either service satisfaction is not forthcoming from IT or is not delivered at a reasonable cost or in appropriate timeframes, then the power has truly moved.

This post from Ed Sim nails the story.

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Teqlo - a mashup platform for the masses? Monday, February 19, 2007

Dennis Howlett has blogged on several occasion about Teqlo but its' only recently that they have opened the beta to the general public. I confess that in the absence of trying the service it was hard to understand what the fuss was about, particularly since the site home page gave almost no info away.

So having finally been able to sign up, I confess that I can see why Dennis was getting excited, albeit there is clearly some way for the service to go.



Their intro video is here, which follows the style of the increasingly infamous web2.0 video.



Teqlo provides a platform within which non-programmers can join "widgets" together to create personalised applications. Whilst this initially appears daunting, Teqlo has provided a couple of pre-configured apps to start you off. One is a simple "lead & call" app which allows you to record to-do's that are automatically added into your google calendar; the second returns results from a search of your LinkedIn account with a google map of the contacts that you select from those results.

It took some "fiddling" to get the hang of modifying the examples, but it was quickly evident how immensely powerful this environment is, far more so than the current incarnation of Yahoo Pipes. I'm intending to continue to play with Teqlo because I've hardly scratched the service of what seems possible. As ever, it's always easier to develop an application if you have a real need rather than just dabbling with no purpose. Also the environment is presently constrained by the range of widgets that may be usefully "mashed-up" - some of the google widgets are clearly designed to simply be viewed and no "do'ed". But this inventory will continue grow and I can see Teqlo being an important pioneer in "crossing the chasm" to the mainstream.

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Zoho have an impressive inventory of great apps Friday, February 09, 2007

Playing with the Zoho Notebook application has reminded me what an extensive range of great applications are offered by Zoho. Most are free and yet are still serious contenders for best app in their respective classes.



I think that Zoho Writer and Sheet probably have the edge over Google's equivalent offerings. Zoho Crm is very good and compares well to apps from Salesforce and Freecrm. Zoho Chat is probably not as good as meebo but only because it presently lacks the IM aggregation facilities.

Other services that I'd previously overlooked include a great FREE website monitoring tool entitled Site 24x7, to which you can add multiple websites. Similarly, Zoho have also slipped in a free online poll creation application for embedding in websites.

Surely Zoho will be snapped up for a sizeable sum soon, given the impressive creativity and delivery abilities they have consistently demonstrated - another rarity amongst the mass of one-hit wonders.

If you aren't familiar with Zoho, I suggest you remedy this soon and do yourself a favour, assuming you don't mind having Publishan "uninstalled life".

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Adobe's Apollo looks set to transform online/offline divide Sunday, February 04, 2007

I'm going through the demo videos from Demo 07 which are available on the site, starting with the letter "A".

Adobe trailed their forthcoming Apollo product which looks set to transform the development of some applications. According to Adobe

It's a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing Web development skills in HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, Flash and Flex in order to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop. Apollo applications can engage audiences anywhere, anytime, allowing users to interact with RIAs, to experience interactive media and to collaborate on information and documents outside the constraints of the browser.

So, you can build applications for the web using familiar tools, and then create a desktop version. Better yet, the online and offline instances of the resultant applications can be operated in a synchronised manner. At a practical level, this means that something like Google docs, which relies on an online connection, could continue to operate if the connection was lost and "catch up" when the connection was restored. As someone that tends to use online applications almost exclusively, it is a frustration whenever I don't have a connection - this presents an excellent solution to that problem.

The Demo 07 video for this can be found here. The Adobe Labs write up is here

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Why Google docs sucks! Friday, December 22, 2006

I quite liked Writely and was disappointed when the Google facelift was applied, but confess I never tried to write a big document on Writely. So my frustration and fury with Google docs may be linked to issues inherited from its predecessor.

As more of the daily activity move onto online applications, so some of the bigger documents that I have to write occasionally have finally made the transition. A big document for me is in excess of 20 pages.

I've had the same experience on both IE and Firefox.

Trying to do concentrated typing and formatting has proved impossible. Firstly, the formatting seems to have a mind of its own and ends up very haphazard. Insert a carriage return, save the document and wow, where did it go. Bullet points all over the shop.

But much worse is the auto saving function. You are merrily typing away when ZAM; the auto save kicks in as evidenced by a small indicator at the top right of the text box. I'm all in favour of auto save but not when it then proceeds to tell me that the text I've typed since it began unannounced needs to be reapplied and it then repositions my cursor to the top of the document. Perhaps if this was occuring every few minutes I'd be more tolerant.

As it is, I've found this is one area of my work that just isn't ready to migrate online until I switch to a different online word processor (Thinkfree perhaps).

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