Friday, August 25th, 2006
Is Google Still The Ajax King?
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Back when Ajax was still just a gleam in most developer’s eyes and Web 2.0 hadn’t quite kicked into full swing, Google was there at the front, already integrating it into their applications and teaching the world how a little Javascript could make the user experience that much better. Times have changed, though, and other sites have grown up around Google with their own functionality and abilities. Several even do some of the same things Google’s web applications do (calendars, email, word processors), but are they better? This new article from Network Computing explores just this.
Welcome, boys and girls, to the computing world of tomorrow! Desktop programs are a thing of the past, replaced by free, simple, Web-based apps that do everything from spreadsheets to e-mail — and more!
To find out (if Ajax makes us free), we’ve scoured the Internet for the best Ajax-based sites in six categories: calendars, e-mail, information managers, spreadsheets, desktops (known in the Ajax world as webtops), and word processors. We’ve picked the winners and runners-up in each category, and taken a look at a few of the other competitors in each category as well.
They cover six different categories: calendars, email, information managers, spreadsheets, webtops (web based desktops), and word processors. It’s no big surprise, however, that Google’s offerings come out on top most of the time. Google Calendar, Gmail, Notebook, and Spreadsheets sweep their categories. In the web based desktop arena, there’s a tie between Pageflakes and YouOS. For the word processors, it’s Zoho Writer
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The Zoho link works for me.
Personally, I like Netvibes as a web based desktop.
the article is a bit to too positive imho… most office web-apps I tested seemed to be really weak feature-wise… check my reviews:
http://nonsmokingarea.com/blog/tags/office-is-dead
the online office-suite I liked most is actually java- not ajax-based (thinkfree-office)… oh the irony ;), anyone remembers how old the idea of web-based java.office is ?
Netvibes BLOWS away Pageflakes.
YouOS is in a different category altogether – and could be a really great app if it werent so damn slow. I feel like I’m using Windows 95 on my old PI machine!
The link does work for me als well