There are a few office applications I have left out in this series. First, many would argue email applications are part of an office suite, and I agree to that, but I have not included a category for them in this post because most colleges and schools provide email to students as is. If I were to recommend one, I’d say Gmail for its features and offered space. I have also left out database applications as I don’t feel they are essential to a student unless they are majoring in computer science or related, in which case they would likely use Microsoft Access or a school DBMS (Database Management System) – not to mention that the Web 2.0 database applications are more geared towards a completely different ball park. Additionally, I have decided to leave out imaging and project management applications.

This article has three sections to it: “Office Applications,” “Web-based Word Processors Compared,” and “Are Web-based Office Applications Ready for Education?” Also, be sure to check out the comparison grid, or feature matrix, in the “Web-based Word Processors Compared” section.

Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 1
Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 3

Red Arrows indicate personal favorites with education in mind.
Products may appear more than once if related to multiple categories.

Part 2: Office Applications

Word Processing

• Writely: Online Word Processor allowing users to create and edit documents collaboratively online, import Word documents, publicly or privately share documents, publish to a blog, and more.
• Zoho Writer: Similar to Writely, Zoho Writer is an Online Word Processor where you can create, share, and collaborate on documents. Users can also publish to a blog, import and export documents, and make documents public.
• Writeboard: Writeboard is a collaborative writing tool where users can write, share, revise, and compare their documents online with others. It is not an advanced system featuring a WYSIWYG editor, Ajax, and flashy effects, but that’s what I like about it. Writeboard is a personal favorite of mine and as a matter of fact I am using it right now for this very post. It includes version control with text comparing and is great for essays and writeups of any kind. More on Writeboard.
• ThinkFree Write: ThinkFree Write is a free word processor that, at this time, is probably the closest you can get to an online version of Microsoft Office with features and appearance in mind. You can perform formatting options, create tables, add a header/footer, and spell check as you type just like your average desktop word processor. Pretty impressive. You can also open and save Microsoft Word and OpenOffice documents as well as share documents online with others. Note: There are two versions of ThinkFree Write: Quick Edit (Ajax-based) and Power Edit (Java-based).
• AjaxWrite: Lightweight word processor that can read and write Microsoft Word and other standard document formats, display multiple documents at once in tabs, and feature basic formatting. However, feature wise, it just does not cut it for me. What I do like about it is that it’s very quick and there are no signups – get in and get out.

Presentations

• Zoho Show: Web-based presentation tool to create, edit, publish, and show presentations. Zoho Show is very feature packed allowing users to create presentations full of text, images, shapes, lists, and pre-formated content templates. Users can also import their existing PowerPoint and OpenOffice presentations, view presentations online, and export as HTML.
• Thumbstacks: With Thumbstacks, create and share web-based presentations over the web. Thumbstacks provides a clean and easy to use presentation builder, although not as feature rich as Zoho Show, and allows users to export presentations in HTML format.
• SlideShare: Great new service, currently available by invitation only, that consists of an YouTube-like site for Powerpoint and OpenOffice presentations displaying presentations through Flash players. Users can even place the Flash presentation players on their own websites. I’ve been waiting for a site similar to this for some time now; perfect for students and educators wanting to store presentations online for sharing and receiving feedback.
• Empressr: Empressr is an Ajax and Flash-based service that lets you create and share presentations online. One advantage on the feature side is that it uses Flash and Ajax rather than HTML and Ajax allowing you to add more media then other tools including audio and video, although I personally prefer HTML presentations.
• ThinkFree Show: Excellent Java-based presentation application that feels much like Microsoft Powerpoint. Create rich presentations and play them through the online editor or by graphic. You can also save your presentations for viewing in Microsoft Powerpoint and share them with others online.

Diagrams and Mind Mapping

• Mayomi: Mayomi is a free flash-based mind mapping tool that lets you map out ideas, projects, research topics, or anything else that can be dug into. Great for students when it comes to writing essays. More on Mayomi.
• Gliffy: Draw and share diagrams online using Gliffy. You get all of your basic functionality that you would in an offline diagram application but with a few extra bonuses like working online collaboratively and dynamic publishing of diagrams. Create flow charts, floor plans, technical diagrams, and more.
• mxGraph: mxGraph is a very impressive JavaScript based diagramming library where users can create advanced diagrams within their browser. The only catch is that it is not a hosted solution where users can create and save diagrams. It is a library in which companies, and probably schools, can use under the mxGraph license. I’d love for it to be a hosted solution, like Gliffy.

Spreadsheets

• Google Spreadsheets: Create, store and share spreadsheets on the web. Includes real time editing and chatting with others as well as import and export options. Google Spreadsheets is my web-based spreadsheet application of choice, although on the negative side, it does not provide chart functionality.
• EditGrid: “An online spreadsheet featuring real-time-update and extensive collaboration features.” EditGrid has support for more then 500 functions, includes remote data update, access control, and more.
• iRows: Create and share spreadsheets online, create charts, include dynamic information, and upload and save Excel, CSV and OpenDocument files. More on iRows.
• Zoho Sheet: “Zoho Sheet is a web based alternative to traditional spreadsheet applications, like MS Excel or Openoffice Calc. It provides basic spreadsheet functionalities coupled with web based features like sharing, tagging, publishing and more.”
• Num Sum: Possibly the first web-based spreadsheet service launched that introduced social spreadsheets where users can tag their spreadsheets and share with others.
• ThinkFree Calc: Java-based spreadsheet application that has the look and feel of Microsoft Excel. Users can share their spreadsheets and work on them collaboratively online.
• Numbler: Simple online spreadsheet solution with great real-time editing and chatting with multiple users. Nice and clean interface although not as feature packed as some of the other options.

Calendars

• 30 Boxes: 30 Boxes is an online calendar that I feel works great for students due to its simplicity and sharing options. It also features RSS subscription to automatically populate the calendar with feed items on the day they were published – great for tracking teacher blogs and academic feeds. Furthermore, users can access their calendars on the go with 30 Boxes Mobile.
• Google Calendar: A bit on the advanced side, but once you get used to it, you’ll find it’s quite powerful. Users can create multiple calendars; view by day, week, or month; share their calendars with the web or a select few; subscribe to other shared calendars; and more. More on Google Calendar.
• Spongecell: “A free and easy to use calendar for you and your friends.” Features a simple drag and drop interface where events can be created and viewed on calendars in multiple formats. Users can also share their calendars with others.
• CalendarHub: CalendarHub offers a great service for personal and group use offering a simple drag and drop interface, calendar subscribing, reminder notification, and more. More on CalendarHub.

Miscellaneous

• Scanr: Scanr is an interesting product great for those without access to a scanner. Scan, copy and fax whiteboards, documents, and business cards with just a camera phone or digital camera! Great for research at the library and creating a backup of printed class handouts on the computer.
• eFax: Although this may not be that useful for students, I felt it’s worth mentioning. eFax lets users receive faxes through email for free simply by providing them with a temporary phone number that senders can use to send their documents. eFax is free for receiving faxes but will cost you to send them out (eFax Plans).
• Gmail: Generally, most colleges and schools provide email, but if you’re an High School student, chances are you weren’t given one. I’d personally recommend Gmail for its features and space, however you may have trouble using it in schools due to its chat functionality.
• Google Page Creator: Users can create quality sites without learning HTML or any other technical knowledge, although they can use them if they wish. You get 100MB of space for yoursite.googlepages.com and can upload files and attach gadgets to your pages. Here’s an example site I created in just a minute with Part 1 of this series. Dead simple, but presentable.
• Zoho Creator: Can’t find a product that does what you want? Try creating your own. Zoho Creator allows its users to structure a database, insert and connect data, and publically share it with others.

Web-based Word Processors Compared

Throughout my educational career as a student, I know that the program I spent most of my time in was Microsoft Word. In college, every teacher requested that we type our assignments up and send them to their email address so they can “easily” download, review, and email back with changes. It’s a process, and it works, but with today’s technology and offerings, things can be much simpler. Imagine one location where students compose and publish papers accessible online and a place where teachers can collaborate with their students without the need to download or email a single document.

After compiling a list of online word processors for this series, I decided to seperately research each one to find if they are ready for educational use. I realize that services like Writely are excellent for users like me, using it to compose and collaborate on documents for Parallel (my company), but what about students when it comes to assignments that are required to follow certain formatting? Can these web-based word processors handle it?

Time to put web-based word processors to the test! First, I created an account over at Competitious to easily list common word processor features and view a comparison grid displaying features from each product. I then went through features of Writely, Zoho Writer, AjaxWrite, and ThinkFree Write (Online). After viewing the results, it was clear which were capable of following common writing and paper guidelines.

Page & Text Formatting

Student papers don’t require too much formatting, but there are guidelines and structures to be followed – for example, MLA Formatting on research papers. Will we be using web-based products to work on these kind of papers? I can’t say, but I would imagine that we would need to if there are hopes for entire web office suites in the future. During my High School and College career, I’ve had to change document margins, add headers and footers, double space sentences (or often 1.5 space), and enable page numbering. Are web-based word processors capable of such formatting? To find out, I have tested each one looking for text formatting options and page formatting options. Can users bold text, add paragraph styles (Heading 1, Paragraph, Blockquote), double space lines, make page breaks, and add page numbers to the header of each page?

Writely and Zoho Writer are similar in that they offer all of your basic text formatting options, including: bold, italic, paragraph styles (Normal, Heading, Paragraph), and line spacing, but lacked when it came to page formatting only allowing for page breaks. AjaxWrite fell behind when it came to paragraph styling, line spacing, and document formating. Lastly, ThinkFree passed with flying colors featuring text formatting options and page formatting options. It had margins, page breaks, page numbering, and even custom headers and footers. It’s practically Microsoft Word online in appearance and functionality.

Functionality

I want in a word processor, in terms of functionality, spell checking, copy & paste, undo & redo, find & replace, auto-save/backup, and at times, word count. These are functions that I use regularly when working on papers and I assume others as well. Fortunately, all the processors had these functions, except for Zoho Writer not having word count and AjaxLaunch without spell checking, backup options, or word count – didn’t even prompt me when “accidently” closing an unsaved document.

Collaborative Value and Sharing

One advantage is that these products are web based. You can access your documents anywhere at any time and work on them as you normally would. Being web-based also allows you to share documents with others and work on them collaboratively. Users can even work on documents together in real-time from different locations or even post to their blog.

Writely has five stars in this department making it very simple for anyone to publicly or privately share documents, tag documents, compare versions, add comments, subscribe to RSS, and best of all, collaborate in real-time. Zoho Writer had similar results, except I found it a little more confusing to use and had a rough time finding an RSS feed. AjaxWrite had no collaborative functionality or sharing options at all, though its purpose is to simply act as a word processor. Lastly, ThinkFree featured public sharing, tagging, version control, and commenting, but no real-time collaboration like Writely and Zoho.

Feature Matrix

Thanks to Competitious for their great service (expect a review soon), I was able to easily create and manage a Feature Matrix. Competitious does not offer exporting of the Feature Matrix at this time, but they have kindly allowed me to use it for this post.

The matrix covers formatting, document structure, functionality, document objects, collaboration, exporting, and importing. If you have any suggestions about this feature matrix, please feel free to pass it by me and I will change it. I tried to only include common features in word processors, so if you think something is missing that should be there, please let me know.

Summary

These applications are impressive, but not quite there yet. ThinkFree is the only one that was capable of producing an MLA formatted document with double spaced lines, 1-inch margins and headers with my last name and page number. The only problem I had with it though was the fact the interface was so similar to Microsoft Word (confusing and intimidating) and that is was Java-based. Writely on the other hand had an excellent interface that was very inviting with great collaborative features. Zoho Writer had similar results as Writely, but I found the interface to be a little confusing and I deeply missed the top menus you see in applications these days (File, Edit, View, Help, etc.) which made it harder to look for specific functionality. Finally, AjaxWrite did fair in my opinion, acting as a basic word processor but just didn’t cut it for me due to the lack of features.

Are Web-based Office Applications Ready for Education?

As you can tell by the compilation above, Web Office is nearing. But are these applications ready for any main-stream attention? Should we just drop the desktop counterparts and start using Web 2.0 (or Office 2.0) products? In my opinion, not yet, but we’re certainly getting closer to the possibility.

Who knows when it will happen? Maybe in a couple years, or maybe five. What I do know is that right now, web-based office products are on a roll with new enhancements week after week because of technology improving day after day. Not to mention, they’ve got some pretty convincing features to switch for already including collaborative editing, document sharing, online storage, and so on. Did I mention they’re free? At the same time, they lack some important functionality, such as: document formatting (margins, headers, footers, page numbering); adding sounds and video to presentations; and advanced spreadsheeting with charts and forms. Also keep in mind dependence on Internet connection and possible security issues.

All in all, I do not feel school systems or businesses should immediately jump on the Web 2.0 train, but I think it’s time they start considering it as an option and try some of the solutions it has to offer. Try some of the applications for a week or two and find if they work for you. If your a teacher, see if your class prefers writing in the friendly and social Writely, or the intimidating and feature packed Microsoft Word. Some teachers are already doing it (you will see real cases of this in Part 3 of the series). Why not you?

Flock is an excellent browser that I have grown to love. Although, I know of many people that say otherwise because they feel it could easily be done in Firefox by installing some extension. Yes, this may very well be true, but why would you go through all that hassle when Flock is built with a great interface that has these features at default? It’s built for these features for Flock, by Flock, and I’m sure functionality and performance would be much better then installing extensions. Well, I’m a happy user and maybe you will too when you see the features.

I am going to give a run-down of new features and features with large updates including photo sharing, blogging, and Flock’s feed reader, and bookmarking. I feel these are the features that makes Flock so great and each deserves a detailed explanations (full screenshots provided). Let’s take a look.

Photo Sharing

Flock has excellent photo sharing integration. I’ve spoken to many Flock users and read user reviews about the photo sharing and many say they use Flock simply because of the photo sharing. I must say, it is of the main reasons why I use Flock too. What makes it so great is that Flock has direct integration to photo sharing services that many of us already use today, such as Flickr and Photobucket (with more coming). It takes a few simple steps to connect the browser to your Flickr account (one time setup) and will then allow you to easily view your photos, upload and modify photos, and even look at of photos from supported photo sharing services. Flock has this great feature called the Photos Topbar. When you turn on the Photos Topbar (see first screenshot above), a photostream will appear, much like a film-strip, that allows you to scroll through all of your photos. You can also search for photos on the web, find friends using a specific photo sharing service, star (bookmark) your favorite photostreams to easily keep track of them, and more.

Flock also includes a photo uploader with simple drag and drop publishing and image modification options. The uploader allows you to drag photos from your desktop directly into Flock’s upload and will then allow you to set titles, descriptions, and even tags to each photo. At the click of the “Upload” button, Flock will then connect to your photo sharing account, inform you about your account’s space, and upload to the service. I uploaded around 20 photo’s in around 2 minutes with each photo containing titles, descriptions, and tags. Further more, if I ever needed to resize, crop, or rotate a photo, I may do this as well with it’s built in image modification tool.

One feature that I found really neat with this was that if you were posting a thread at a forum or making a comment somewhere on the web, you can easily upload any photo to it in seconds. Simply find a photo on your desktop or from your Flickr photostream and drop it into the text area. If the photo is not available online, Flock will bring up the image uploader and allow you to instantly upload and insert the HTML into the text area. I found this pretty neat and definitely easy.

Blogging

Flock also includes a built in blogging platform so any user can easily pickup on blogging and manage their blogs all within the browser. Flock also includes a neat tool called, Web Snippets, that allows users to easily save images, snippets of text, links, and more in one container while they browse the web. Many users will use this so they can save quotes from a website and include it in a blog post, which Flock allows you to do using simple drag and drop. I however don’t often use others photos or refer to direct quotes on sites, but I found it to be a really helpful tool for when researching a specific topic or product. I can create my own snippets of text, save any photos I may want to refer to later, and save resources all in one area. This way, while I write a post, rather then opening all these tabs and looking at individual pages while I write a post, I can just open Web Snippets and view snippets that I have saved for reference.

The blog editor allows you to connect directly to your blog and create and manage posts. It provides a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor allowing you to easily format text, add links, lists, and more. If you’re not into the whole formatting thing, you can easily switch to the HTML Markup tab. Flock also allows you to save blog posts as drafts to your hard-drive and open them at a later time for publishing. You may also open up the Web Snippets tool while you blog so you can easily drag and drop items in your post or refer to items while you write. And for those of you wondering about pings/notifications to services, like Pingomatic, Flock supports them as well.

Feed Reader

I spend many hours of my day reading through RSS feeds and it was nice to see that Flock has stepped it up with their feed reader since their initial alpha release. It now is a fully functional feed reader allowing you to easily import feeds from any website, create collections of feeds for organization, and read them in a clean interface. It works much like your basic feed reader listing feeds/collections along the left and posts on the right. You can choose to view feeds in a single or double column format and the reader also provides a one page overview off all collections called the “Front Page.” The feader reader works fairly well, although when I imported all of my 250 feeds from Bloglines, it started to lag the browser a bit and have a hard time at displaying stories in the feed reader. I’m sure with less, it would perform much better, but I was hoping it wouldn’t of had any problems.

Flock will notify you of new posts as they come in by displaying a gold circle on the news reader icon from the toolbar. If you are wondering how often Flock will check for new posts, according to the FAQ section, Flock will check feeds for updates every hour or you can individually refresh feeds.

Flock also provides simple feed importing to the feed reader. First, on any website you can click on the feed icon in the address bar to view and import the feed. This isn’t anything all that new and popular browsers do this already too. But what really got me was when I went to import my Bloglines OPML. I clicked on Bloglines export option which opens up an OPML formatted document with all my subscribed feeds. Flock recognized it was an OPML file and allowed me to view all the feeds and with one click, subscribe to all of them. In one click, without me having to save the OPML file to my hard-drive, it imported all 250 feeds in less then a second. It honestly put a smile to my face – no joke. It’s rare that you find such simple import options such as that and I feel they did a nice job with it.

Bookmarking

Flock tightly integrates social bookmarking into its browser with Del.icio.us and Shadows. It allows you to easily connect to either of these services so you can view your bookmarks within the browser and save bookmarks as you browse the web at the click of a button. On the left of the address bar is a star. Single-clicking this star with perform a quick save, only saving the link to your bookmarks on your hard-drive. However, double-clicking the star will allow you to save a bookmark to a collection, tag, and add a description to the bookmark, as well as automatically publish it to your social bookmarking account (Del.icio.us or Shadows). It’s simple and quick. My only complaint with the bookmarking functionality is that the bookmark manager feels a bit cluttered to me. With hundreds of bookmarks, opening the manager presents you with a full list of bookmarks close together making it a little difficult to pick one. Although, the search located at the bottom does help with it’s filtering as you type. Just my opinion though and many may not even use the bookmark manager if they are happy with sticking to the social bookmarking service. Either way, Flock offers nice and simple bookmarking integration and I like being able to save bookmarks with a click of the mouse.

The screenshot above is the FilmLoop’s main interface. When it starts up, it will load the bar with all loops that you are subscribed to and that you set to be shown. Now, you may be asking, what exactly is a loop? You can think of a loop as a string of photos that moves across the users screen (scrolls left or right) that can be a private or public loop or a loop you have been invited to. Users can then “communicate” with the loop by subscribing, commenting, and even adding to the loop. The interface for displaying the loops is a small and uncluttered strip using gray, black, and blue colors which actually seems to help keep the focus of the strip the photos. At the bottom of the strip are the options, loop controls, and a slider so you can quickly scan through all your loops. One thing that I would like to see for the interface would be a way to control the speed of the scrolling. At times I feel it is too slow or too fast. You also can skip directly to the next or previous loop by click on the next and previous buttons that look much like an media player. I do feel that when going pressing the next and previous buttons, it skips too fast to the loop and brings on a little confusion. I feel that if they can integrate a smooth sliding inertia type effect to the loop, it would make it a whole better.

Creating your own loop is extremely simple. Open FilmLoop and click on the “create” button located at the bottom left of the strip. You will then be asked to name your loop and when you click, “OK,” it will then skip to your new loop with a graphic saying to click and drag the photos you want in the loop onto the graphic (inside your loop, in other words). You can also click on it to bring up an open dialog. In the screenshot above, you can see that I opened a folder of photos. I can then simply drag one at a time into the loop or even select multiple and drag them all in at once. Once you drag them in you will notice each one appearing one after another. When you put a photo in a loop, it is actually storing the photo onto a secure FilmLoop server, explaining why they do not appear immediately. Once the photos are in you can start setting actions to each photo and even share your loop. Just a note about sharing: If you invite others to use your loop, they can also click and drag photos into your loop and it will update the loop, which is an excellent feature and really livens the social aspect of FilmLoop. Inviting is also very easy. You simply click on the “invite” button at the bottom of FilmLoop, select a loop from the list, fill in some email addresses, add a message, and send. They will receive the invite by email and can then subscribe to your loop and download FilmLoop if they haven’t yet.

Now lets talk about something even more interesting, the loops and loop actions. Each photo in a loop has what FilmLoop calls, actions. You can set an action to show more details of a photo, go to a website, open another loop, bring up a comment area, and more. At default, when you create your own loop, photos will use the Zoom View, which is how you can view details on a photo, view descriptions, comments, and other options. But if you were to subscribe to, lets say, a news loop. The loop will most likely show photos based on the news and on clicking a photo, it would direct you to the news article in relation to the photo.

(View Larger Screenshot)

When you click on a photo that has the action set to, Zoom View, a window will open that looks similar to the above (Larger Screenshot). A Zoom View window will show you the photo at a bigger size, descriptions, tags for the loop, comments, and options for printing, saving, rotating and deleting. If you are the creator of the loop, you will also be able to change descriptions and manage the comments. The comment system is very basic but gets the job done. Comments will be shown on the top right and along with the name of the commenter. You can also click on the fullscreen option that will show the photo in full screen and allow you to browse through the photos in the loop like a slideshow.

I have explained the basics of the FilmLoop interface, what loops are, and how to create your own loops. But you cannot fully experience FilmLoop until you view the broadcast network. To view the network, open FilmLoop and select, “Network,” which is located at the bottom of the strip. It will then open a new window called the “Loop Organizer.” On the left column, you will see a list with selection for the network, your library, now playing, and other folders or playlists if you rather. If you clicked on the network button on the FilmLoop strip, you should see the network selected on the left and on the right a page that is your method of finding loops. On the top of the page are a list of categories that you can select to view, such as public, humor, news, places, sports, etc.. Below this you will see a nicely layed out page with photos about various hot topics and news. When you click on the any of these photos, it will subscribe you to the loop and show all the photos in the FilmLoop strip. If you don’t like it, you can easily ubsubscribe by right clicking and choosing unsubscribe. I want to look for specific loops though and at the time, I was interesting in humor. So, I selected the Humor tab at the top. It then directs you to a page that lists all of the loops in the humor category. Selecting a loop will subscribe you to it and load it into the strip. If there are a large amount of loops, it will split them up into pages, which you can select at the bottom of the page. I feel that this method of showing all the loops is rather hard to search through and even though they are placed in the specific categories. They need to incorporate some type of search bar at the top that you can search through all loops. They also allow you to add tags to your loops that you create, but I do not see any way of searching by tags anywhere. I would really like to see a page for a tag cloud. Other than that, the only other issue I saw was that the cartoon, Dilbert, was nowhere to be found and I could not even make a search for it.

Now that you know how to subscribe to loops, lets take a look at unsubscribing, organizing, and hiding loops. Simply open up the network window again and as stated above, you can select to see your library on the left. Click on, “My Library” will show everything you have created, been invited to, or subscribed to. Each loop that is listed will show if the loop is playing, what the loop is called, who the creator is, and the last time it has been updated. If you do not want to show a loop on FilmLoop but still wish to subscribe to it, click on the loop and then select, “Stop Playing,” at the bottom of the window. You will now see that the loop will not be shown anymore in the strip, but still visible your library. You can also right click on a loop to easily invite people, unsubcribe from it, or set it to play again. The “Now Playing” folder will show all loops that you have allowed to be shown on your loop. If you decide to hide one, it will not show that loop in this folder. You can also see loop that you have created or loops that you have subscribed to two by selecting their folders. If you do not like to view all of the loops this way, you can create your own folders and click and drag loops inside of them. The only thing that I have been doing really is just subscribing and unsubscribing.

Another thing that I want to mention is that you can link to your loops from your website. If you go the “What Is FilmLoop?” section from the FilmLoop website, you will see on the left three scrolling loops. You can actually make those for your own loops as well and insert them on your site, which I find is really great. Perfect if you own a photography website. To do this, go to your loop in FilmLoop and right click it. Then select, “Web/Blog Link.” You will then see a button that says, “Copy HTML.” Click on that and then just paste the code in your site. That’s all to it!

Overall, FilmLoop is great. It is feature packed, you can subscribe to your favorite loops, create your own, and even collaboratively work on a loop. I haven’t run into any bugs yet and the performance is surprisingly well with a memory usage much less then many other applications I have running. I hope for the best of luck for FilmLoop and feel that it will be very successful. FilmLoop has already raised $5.6 million in from two Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms: GlobeSpan Capital Partners and Garage Technology Ventures and it seems that the company has some high expectations. Hope they meet them. Great work, FilmLoop.

View FilmLoop – Are you in the loop?

If you have seen Microsoft’s Start.com project, then you will notice that Live is very similar in looks and basic functionality. This is because the team working on Live are the ones who are also working on Start.com. But they have made some new features that makes Live worth a look. Live gives you a simple to use interface using Ajax technology with drag and drop style blocks. You can drag each block into different columns and above or below other blocks. Something new that I liked was that you can say how many columns you want on your page. At default, it is set to two, but I like to have three and was happy to be able to set that. At the top of the page is a search bar and below that are your blocks along with the sidebar and options. The sidebar provides you with preset feeds you can subscribe to, preset gadgets, and a selection called, “My Web,” which are items that you have created for the page. You can create blocks for feeds, weather, horoscopes, search results, and even better, the new gadget functionality (I will touch up on this below). I also want to note that Live only works in Internet Explorer at the time and they are working on Firefox compatibility.

The search functionality of Live has some nice features. When you make a search, it will come up with results from the web. But you can also select to search from news or feeds. It will not search the actual feed content itself though, just the name and description of feeds. Another feature that I liked was that when you make a search, on the top right of the results you will see a link that says, “add to my page.” When you click this, it will turn it into a block that will show the top results for that search term. If you want search results in a block on your page though, I recommend using the Multi-search Microsoft Gadget, which brings me to my next topic, gadgets.

Gadgets are small third-party applications that you can easily add to your page using the “Add Content” option located in the sidebar. I find these gadgets very interesting because anyone can develop their own using JavaScript/DHTML. There are some interesting gadgets already and I imagine there will be a lot more soon. To install a gadget, go to the Microsft Gadgets website and find a gadget of interest. When you are on that gadgets page, select the link, “Add this Gadget to Live.com.” It will then go to Live.com and provide you with a URL and some instructions telling you to go to “Add Content” and inserting the Gadget URL in the advanced area. You gadget should now appear in the left sidebar. When it does, click on it and you will see a message, like in the above screenshot, asking you to install the gadget. Once installed, you can then drag the gadget from the sidebar onto your page.

Personally, I feel the gadgets are the highlight of Live.com, and it looks like TechCrunch agrees. I have actually tried all the available gadgets at the time (eight so far) and they work rather well. Some acted buggy at times and some I just haven’t a use for. I really liked the gadget for Flickr and the Todo list, which you can see in the above screenshot. The Todo list is very basic and could use some design adjustments, but gets the job done. The Flickr gadget allows you to enter a tag and then it will create a slideshow of photos under that tag and change every five seconds or so. You can also find gadgets for Multi-searching, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and the fun Trackword that is a different scrambled word everyday. These all can be found at the Gadget Gallery.

Overall, I didn’t find Live.com all that great and think I am going to stick with Netvibes as my personal page for now. I know Live is still in early beta though and will give a some time. I found it a little buggy at times, some of the gadgets had troubles every now and then, and I just personally like the look and feel of Netvibes more. I also don’t really understand what the point of the “Hide” feature is. They say it is to make the page cleaner, but really, I just find it as a pointless addition. You can hide all of the blocks and the sidebar and still have the search bar visible. This is cool, but the thing that I didn’t like about it was that when you made a search, nothing happens or appears because it is all hidden. If I make a search, I want to see the results. I don’t want to fill in a term, click search, then click on the show link so I can see them. Other than that, no big issues. They are working on Firefox compatibility too, which is great to hear.

View Windows Live.

One feature that I did not notice at first is the searching of your favorites and history. The way it works is very neat and makes searching easily. At the top right search box, begin typing a word and it will create a list of sites in your favorites and history and present them in a nice organized dropdown that you can select from. One thing that I did not notice though was a method to search in the actual Favorites Manager. I would really like that becuase it will provider a much bigger area to view and search.

I have also received a few emails about adding bookmarks with tags. It is actually very simple and I love the way you write out the tags in Flock. You go to, Favorites > Star and Tag this Page. This will then bring up a window like you see above. As you type a tag, it is appears as normal. But once you hit comma, it will turn it into a bubble circling the word. To edit a tag you have already written, double click it and it will allow you to do so. This tagging method is also used when tagging a post for your blog.

Just a few other notes about Flock. You will notice that you do not have a stop button. Why is this? It is because when a site is actually loading, the refresh button will then change to a stop button. I really like this because it provides Flock more space for their features and it also gives us more space to add any additional buttons to the bar. As for Blogging Platforms, I know that WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad work. I did hear that they were working on Movable Type. This is for the release that I have received and not the one they are soon to release, so I am not sure as to how much of a change their will be. You can setup multiple blogs and have multiple ping services. You can add ping services by going the options for Flock and selecting, “Blogging.” I have also recieved a few questions about the rendering engine of Flock. Flock uses Firefox as its backend, which is absolutely great. You can use Firefox extensions on it and I have tried a few and they seem to work just fine. I do not believe you can change themes though, but really, I don’t want to. I love the design and I even have my wallpaper set to Flock’s wallpaper right now!

On an important note: Geoffrey has also informed me that the issue with del.icio.us automatically adding their Flock bookmarks is now fixed. He told me it will be fixed for the next build, which I am assuming is the one that is going to be released shortly.

Did I have any other issues? Honestly, nothing too serious. Sometimes the feed viewer would lag on me and then say the script couldn’t continue running and sometimes when I viewed my memory usage, it was fairly high. But this will all get better in time and I do not know if these problems have already been fixed or not in the new release that we are all waiting for.

Now just sit back and wait for the release! Great work, Flock, and congratulations.

P.S. If anyone was wondering, I have purchased a new hosting provider and I will be switching servers hopefully in a day or two. I just need some time to transfer all my files and databases. Thank you for your patience and I apologize for the problems that have been occuring.

Flock did a good job at sticking to the basic structure of a browser and basically looks like a beautified Firefox, but with extra features. The buttons on the navigation bar has the basic back, forward, refresh, and home button. But you also get a few new buttons such as a button to open the blog editor, the favorites manager, and the star button to star a site (will get to this later). You also have the address bar and search bar just like Firefox. You will also notice in the screenshot above a dark gray shaded area with photos. That is one of Flock’s topbars. There are only two topbars as of now. The “Flickr Photos” and “Blog Topbar.” The Flickr is the one that you see above. You can enter a username and then it will load the photos right into the top bar. Then selecting and dragging a photo down into the browsers window, it will load the Flickr page for that photo. I absolutely loved knowing that I can be at any website and then open up the a topbar to view the latest photos. I also mentioned the Blog Topbar. With this Topbar open and setup with your blog settings, you can easily select any text from a website and click and drag it into a box that they provide. When you drag it into the box, it will actually bring up the Blog Editor allowing you to create a post very easily with the text you selected in a blockquote and reference to the source, where you selected the text.

Flock also said that there was del.icio.us integration with the browser, so I went straight to the Favorites Manager to see what they have done. When entering for the first time, it asked if I had a del.icio.us account. I filled in my information and then the bookmarks page refreshed with all the bookmarks that I have in del.icio.us… that was easy. On the left are your collections and tags. On the right are your bookmarks in columns with the name, url, tags, and any other information that you wish to select to list, such as description from del.icio.us, and last modified or added dates. Although, when I added the last modified or added dates columns, no values were shown. Maybe something that needs looking at.

In the left column of the Favorites Manager are your collections and tags. Focused in the collections area you can view your current collections, which are pretty much your own groups of bookmarks, You will see, “Your Library,” which are all of your bookmarks. I like how they used the term, library, for this. It makes me feel like im in iTunes. Now, something that I did feel weird with though was the fact that the History is also in the Favorites Manager. I like how it is in here, but it is just a little odd being that History is not my favorites (but could be) and also because I am used to doing “View > Toolbars > History” inside of Firefox. Not a big problem, it just means a little change for me. You will also see your own created collections. They start you off with one called, “Default” that has a few Flock bookmarks in it (note that it also added these to my del.icio.us bookmarks, which was unexpected). Your own collections are good for your own organization and not only that, but for the favorites toolbar built into the browser. You will see these links when you first setup the browser on the favorites bar (which is in the same spot as Firefox had your “Bookmarks Toolbar Folder”). The thing that I liked though was that it splits the favorites up by your collections you created and you can then select a collection on the right of the favorites toolbar to view. So, I can have a collection for my blogs, frequent visits, etc.. Something that is also really neat with collections is that if you have sites that have feeds, then it will detect this and show them. But, on top of that, on the side of the collection name, it will say, “Feeds.” When you click this, it will actually show you all the sites combined in that one file that Flock generates. It will use its built in feed viewer for this (I will explain this later).

Adding of favorites is also very simple. Now, remember that the favorites are integrated with del.icio.us if you provided login details, so when you add a favorite, it will add it to del.icio.us as well. Another difference is that they do not refer to adding of bookmarks as, “Add to Favorites,” but rather, “Star this Page.” Staring is your method of adding links to your favorites and delicious. If you look at the top address bar (where the URL of the site you are at is), you will see a blue star button. When you click this, it will star the page and add it to your favorites/del.icio.us bookmarks. If you look at the star closer, you will notice that there is an arrow on it as well. Click on the arrow and the favorites menu will open allowing for more options to select from. The favorites menu allows you to star a page along with adding tags to it, you can star multiple tabs at once (all tabs that are open), add the page to a collection that you have, and you can even see your most recent favorites or frequently visited bookmarks. If you do not like how it adds to del.icio.us, you can disable this in the options.

Now lets take a look at the Flock Blog Editor. The blog editor actually surprised me on what can be accomplished with it. It is a small editor but it does have some great features. In the screenshot above, I have the Blog Topbar open. This allows me to see a list of recent posts and drafts from my site (Note: I have it pointing to a different server right now. Flock is still in the works, so I’m not plugging it to Solution Watch yet.) You can have multiple blogs setup for it. When first opening the Blog Topbar for the first time, you will setup a blog for it. You can then go to the options for Flock to add more along with pinging services for when you update a blog. Now, back to the editor itself. It uses a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor on the top and right below this is the source that you can edit. I really like that because being a programmer, I just don’t really trust WYSIWYG all the time. It does seem to work really well with producing valid code, however. You can bold, italic, change font size, tab, and insert links. One thing that I really felt was a necessity though that Flock did not have was a way to add images through the WYSIWYG. Just functionality like links would please me. You can open the Flickr topbar and drag the photos down from that though, which is great. You can also just drag an image from a site and drag it right into the text area, like other WYSIWYG. If the Flock team could create some type of image manager or something of the sort, that would be excellent. Maybe having a window that you can open that will show a list of images on your server that you can select from and insert into a post? I would absolutely love that. Moving along with the editor, you can also add Technorati tags to your posts using their simple tag box on the right on the text areas. If you are not done with a post, you can save it as a draft and when you are done, you can publish it and it will update your blog. Great work on the editor. I just want a little better image functionality.

The next thing that I felt was worth mentioning is what Flock calls, Shelf. Shelf is actually a very helpful little tool. What you do is go to the menu for Flock and select Tools and then Shelf. A small window will now open that looks similar to the Download window from Firefox and inside it will have a background image saying, “Drop Stuff Here.” So, that is what you do. Go to a website, select some text, and then click and drag it down onto the Shelf window and drop it in the white area. It will then add an item to it, similar to what you see above. Now that you have an item in Shelf, what do you do with it? Well, simply with Shelf open, you can now click and drag any item from it into a text area in Flock. It will then paste the HTML and everything for you. What I really liked about it though is that if you selected text from a site, put it in Shelf, and then dragged it into a text area, it will actually blockquote the text and link to the site where you got the text from. This makes Shelf very useful for blogging and quoting people.

The next thing I want to mention is that Flock has an inline feed viewer. Whenever you go to a feed, it will show it in a format, much like what you see above. Very clean and layed out page. You can collapse and Expand all the entries, sort by date, sort by source, and it makes it very easy to read with simpe typography that is at a readable size. They also have a button for switching back to the website the feed came from. It is perfect for getting a quick glance at an RSS feed or you can even add it to your favorites or a collection for your navigation toolbar if you want to keep up on it that way.

I am almost done! Let me just spit out some thoughts and ideas for Flock. First, Even Eckard has wrote his feelings about how Flock automatically adds themselves to your del.icio.us account when first setting it up. I don’t like this and I know that others do not agree with it as well. If you want, maybe even give the option or a warning? Have a yes or no dialog come up asking if we will allow it to add them to our del.icio.us accounts. Next, as I mentioned when writing about the Blog Editor, I feel that a method for browsing images from a directory online or even from your computer would be a great addition. It would make the environment a whole lot easier for me and other bloggers that use images a lot in their posts. Scott Jarkoff also stated in his review a feature request. The request was for adding a Topbar that will show images from Flickr based on the context of the site you are currently visiting. This is a great idea, but I understand it could be fairly stressful for the browser too, so I am not too concerned about that. It would certainly make the browser even more social. Now, an issue that I seem to be coming across as I am writing this post is that it has problems with refreshing content when submitting the form from WordPress. Let me explain first. I would write a few sentences and then save the draft. When it refreshes back to the same page, it did not show my updates, nor my content in the text area. At first I thought it ignored it, but I then when to a different page and then back to the draft again and it was there. Seemed like some sort of cache/refreshing issue when submitting a form repeatedly. I am not sure if this is only me experiencing this, but it definitely made me scratch my head for a while. (Note: I just saved at that last sentence and when it came back, the sentence wasn’t there. I then went to a different page and back again or a simple cache refresh of the page and it was there.)

Overall, I love Flock. It has some excellent features and it definitely shows the social and blogging side to it. The interface is designed beautifully and it is a great browser. Sure, there are a few issues here and there, but it isn’t complete yet and only in Beta. I was very impressed with what I saw and am sure they have more coming. Flock team, excellent work. I love what has been done so far and I see a great future for Flock.

View Flock (announcement signup).

Update: Just noticed another helpful feature built into Flock. When you have multiple tabs open, you can click and drag each one of them to the left and right. You will see small arrows pointing down in the position to drop it. I have been wanting draggable tabs for a while in Firefox. (Thanks to Tristan and Tom who pointed out Firefox Beta 2 now has draggable tabs.) Great addition to Flock.

Update: Geoffrey from Flock has left a comment and mentioned on his blog that they are working on fixing the del.icio.us issue with automatic adding of Flock bookmarks and it was not their intent. They are working on it, and remember, this is what Beta releases are for!

Also, my server seems to be a little bogged down today. Sorry if it is acting up for you. I am trying to get the issue resolved.

SpyDefense sounded great, so I have decided to give a a go. After using it, I fell in love with it. Here is a basic overview of what you get with this spyware application.

Above, I am currently in express mode, which is meant to be very easy for beginner users. Just how simple is it? So simple that I just click on “Scan” and the rest was performed automatically for me. Once it completes the scan, which only takes a few minutes, it will say that the scan has been completed and the basic results. Well… that was easy! It then has a link directing to the Advanced area. The advanced area is really slick.

The advanced mode of SpyDefense is still not hard to use, but it provides a lot in means of customizing and other complex options of that sort. You have the ability to change file sizes checked, what folders to look through, scan all user profiles at once, cleaning and removing options, and a nice scheduling area to tell it when to run.

Lets now go to the main advanced area. You will see an overview of the last run that you have made. I luckily had zero return, but my first scan did say two. You may now be asking, but how about viewing your history of scans? Ok, simple (see a pattern?). In the screenshot above, you see that I am over the link, “Last scan results.” Click that and you will then be shown a listing of your previous scans. You can remove them all, remove each individually, and view the details of the scan. Next, you will want to click on, “Scan Details.” It will then bring up the results in a new browser window. I thought this is a great way of presenting the history. You will see something similar to what you see below:

Nice clean web-based overview page with a basic overview of the files found and what has been done to them. Excellent. I am really happy with the application. It seems to work great, is very easy but complex at the same time, looks pretty, and it is everything that I need. Oh, did I mention that it is also free? Yes, that too. It’s free.

View SpyDefense – Simple for Beginners, Complex for Advanced Users. (via Genbeta)

The adminstration is a simple, easy on the eyes, and straight to the point interface. You can easily add, edit, and remove entries, categories, photos, comments, and links that you may want to include on your photoblog. It also now has a visitor tracking system built into the admin so you can get a basic look over who is visiting your photoblog. Another feature that I really like is that you can set “Date Visibility.” This is really cool. You ever want to make a few posts at once, but don’t want them all posted at once? Well, with Date Visibility, you can set them to post at specific times in the future! Perfect. The admin is a whole lot better and much of the backend has been improved. But, lets look more into the actual blog itself. Here is Ryan’s Personal PhotoBlog that you can see is using the latest version.

The themes look excellent at default, but you can easily change them if you wish. You have a nice and easy method of viewing archives, next and previous photo, comments, and overview. When viewing a seperate photographs page, you get details about the photo and the camera used (what you see above). It can provide the visitor with details such as camera type, exposure, shutter speed, focal length, etc.

If you do not like the blog just showing the most recent posts on the main page, you can use a new feature called, Gallery Mode. Enabling this option in the administration will actually turn your site into a gallery page instead that will list the categories on the main page. So, if your not into blogging and galleries are your thing, OneReaction is still for you!

One last feature that cannot be untold. What you see above is SendTo, an actual application built specifically for OneReaction. It is the desktop companion alternative for managing your photoblog, and believe me, this is really nice. “This application allows you to post to your OneReaction web site without having to log into your administrative interface through the browser. All of the options available to you when posting through the administrative interface are also available in SendTo with one exception: you can now queue and post multiple entries in one batch upload.” The application is available for Windows.

You can very easily manage the blog with this application and makes the experience a whole lot greater. OneReaction is an amazing photoblogging software, and I am shocked that it is free. OneReaction uses ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL for its backend, so make sure you have these before giving it a go. Ryan, once again, excellent job. You really improved OneReaction a great amount.

View OneReaction PhotoBlog Software.

Above is what you will see upon entering the site. First is the “Sample Text” area. In this area, you can either leave the Lorem gibberish that is in there already, or you can replace it with your own content to get an even better idea of what it is to look like. Next, lets start of with the first column that you see. You can see that when selecting a font, you are given two choices. You can choose a typeface from the preset list or make a selection through the typefaces that are on your system. The preset selection is very useful in that it splits up Windows and Macintosh default fonts and gives you a “Safe List” on the top that exist in both of the Operating Systems. That is great because I can never remember what fonts are safe to use or not!

After selecting the font, you now choose other attributes for it. You can choose size, leading, tracking, text decoration, color, background, and more. You will notice that as you change these, the content below the column will be changing as well with the styles that you set. Now you can very easily see what the font is to look like on your design. Also, if you notice as you look down the column of content, it has different styles automatically to look at. You can see regular, bold, italic, bold italic, uppercase and small capital characters along with bold and italic for them as well.

Now just repeat that on the other columns! You can now easily figure out what typeface will work best on your website. Very useful and I will be using this for completing my redesign of Solution Watch (sshh).

Marko, excellent work on this. Congrats on making such a useful tool.

View Typetester – Compare fonts for the screen.

Update: Forgot to mention, when you are done with styling your content. You can then go to the top right and select the “Tools” tab. Then you will see links next to, “Get CSS for,” that allows you to get the actual CSS for the columns you made. Enjoy.

The extension is perfect and is exactly what I have always wanted! Your bookmarks from Chipmark will be placed into a menu, just like the Bookmarks menu in firefox. Here is my scenario: Since I have a laptop now, I may be posting for Solution Watch on my laptop, or at my home computer. The problem was, my bookmarks on Firefox at home were not the same as the ones on my laptop and this is very important when it comes to writing for SW. Since Chipmark allows extensions into the browser, I now have Chipmark in Firefox on my home computer and on my laptop. They now have the same bookmarks, no matter what. And on top that, I can still get to them anywhere I want because the web-based manager.

(Looks just like the regular Bookmarks menu in Firefox)

How cool is that! Now, you may be wondering. Is it easy to manage? Very easy and even uses tagging (I will get to this later)! When you delete a bookmark in the Chipmark menu, it will delete it from your account. When you edit the bookmark (right click > properties), it will edit it. Very simple.

Above is what you will see why you choose, “Chipmark This Page.” The screenshot is a little slim with what it shows, but the first input is the name of the bookmark. Second is the description, and then you get a selection of choosing permissions. You can make your bookmarks public or private. I believe the private option just wont allow anyone to find it on the Chipmark website. The “toolbar” checkbox will allow you to add the bookmark to the Chipmark toolbar, like your Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar folder. The toolbar is optional and I do not use it… just the menu makes me more than happy. Also note that the Name and Description fields are automatically filled in when they can, so you don’t have to always type something to add a bookmark.

What you see below the fields are the folders, on the left, and your labels on the right. Labels are pretty much tags. You click create the “New Label” button on the bottom to add label to the list on the right. When you add a favorite, you just select the labels from the list. Labels are not accessible in the extensions, but when you login to the web-based manager, you are able to view labels and see what labels are assigned to each bookmark. This has helped me out quiet a bit already too.

I have done the task of completely ignoring the Firefox bookmarks menu now (you have the option to hide the bookmarks menu in the Chipmark’s preferences too, btw.) except for when I need to go solution hunting through the past bookmarks I have. I now only use Chipmark and make sure to make a backup of them every now and then, because I add a lot of bookmarks everyday and just like having the option to do so. You can make backups easily by going into options and choosing, export. Then to add them again, just import them back. I love Chipmark and I am sure many of you will like this as much as I do.