There are few, if any, horizontal platforms that offer users the capability to e-mail, create, and edit documents and pictures, and collaborate across all three major desktop computing platforms as well as almost every major smartphone platform. Glide 3.0 has just updated, introducing changes aimed at parental control and creating a child-friendly environment.
Glide's circular interface with pie-chart divisions makes navigating a more interesting task.
(Credit: Glide)The new e-mail filter lets parents intercept all messages sent to a child's in-box. Parents can then approve or deny the e-mails so children can only see preapproved messages, filtering out pornographic spam, phishing attempts, and other junk. Parents need to create a secondary e-mail account in Glide that they can control access rights too, similar to how Glide allows rights controls for attachments if you're familiar with that system.
From there, parents will be able to access the child's e-mail from a drop-down menu on the upper right corner of the e-mail interface. When the parent enters the child's account, they can approve each e-mail individually or as a group by clicking on the e-mail and clicking Approve or Delete. Since all e-mails sent to the child default as unapproved until given a green light, parents don't have to worry about children seeing unauthorized e-mails.
Both children and adult can take advantage of the new drawing and coloring tool. It works a bit like MS Paint, except with Glide's collaborative tools built in, and a much more interesting interface. Colors appear as crayons in a box, and users can choose from preselected backgrounds, a blank canvas, or images in their own libraries to drawn on. Standard drawing tools are included, such as a freehand pen, line tools, typographic text, and shapes. Glide Draw also offers zooming and undo/redo. The tools can be accessed from the Draw text link at the bottom of Glide's main interface.
Existing features in Glide have also gotten a power boost. E-mail import and export capabilities have been overhauled. An Import button will copy the body text of an e-mail into a Glide Write document, while the new Export button creates a PDF, DOC, DOCX, or RTF out of the body text. Attachments can also be one-clicked to a destination folder, and Glide Writer and the Glide e-mail interfaces have seen a design redo.
Interestingly, the Glide Application suite has been integrated into Glide e-mail, so that the word processor, presentations application, photo editor, and collaborative tools are available to all e-mail recipients. Even if you're not a Glide user, the tools will be available to you. This includes automatic group discussions and online meetings. Utilizing Glide Desktop Applications (download for Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris) participants can synchronize the files that they're discussing.
Webkit-based browsers Safari and Chrome also earned full support in the Glide OS improvements.
Its stunning cross-platform usability and its equally impressive granular rights-granting for file-sharing and attachments aside, performance improvements appear to not have been part of the most recent Glide OS update. It's not the fastest loading Web application, but users looking for something that will function anywhere on almost any desktop or handheld should check it out.
Glide OS, the Webtop that impressed audiences at the D6 conference last month, has finally gotten around to working with Yahoo's various Web mail properties this morning. Just in time too, since Yahoo's vanity "Ymail" domain just went live yesterday.
Users can now plug in their various Ymail, Rocketmail, and Yahoo Mail accounts and view them in one place, similar to Orgoo, a product that's still in private beta. The one caveat for both services is that you must be a Yahoo Mail Plus subscriber, Yahoo's $19.99 per year premium Web mail service.
Glide users can now drop in their Yahoo mail accounts as long as they're paying Plus members.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher put Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer up on stage first thing at the D6 conference, and by doing so, let them set the agenda for the operating system discussion here at the show.
Microsoft's duo didn't do a great job of capitalizing on that position. Rather, they left a lot of room for other companies to excite the audience with newer ideas. Two companies here are taking on that charge.
Ghost
The first, Ghost, demo'd Wednesday. Its product is a "virtual computer," as the company calls it. Hosted at Amazon Web Services, it's designed to be everything you need from a computer, except it's not on your computer. You get a file system (with 5GB of storage for free), a media player, and links to some apps. For example, if you want to edit a word processing file, you can launch it into Thinkfree or Zoho.
The fact that Ghost doesn't come with a bunch of its own apps is the key to this product, and what makes it more like an actual OS than many other Web-based OS experiments I've seen. The design goal of Ghost is that it acts as the clearinghouse for all your Web app accounts, letting you shuffle data between them. For example, if you have a document in Zoho Writer and want to edit it in Google Docs, Ghost will make the transition automatic. If you want to drag a file from your Flickr account into your Ghost file store, and later to an e-mail, Ghost will do that, too.
The Ghost desktop looks--and works--a lot like Windows.
The interface for all of this runs within a browser, and that's the only place it will work at first. There's no offline version, and one of the venture funders for the company said the team doesn't believe that online/offline synchronizing will work with typically forgetful users (although a company representative later told me they're considering talking to Sharpcast to offer sync capability). Ghost is being built to be the one true glue that holds all your online apps together.
Also, Ghost is cool since it's a Palestinian/Israeli collaboration.
The company plans to make money through affiliate deals for the services it links to.
Answering the obvious question--How do you change user behavior to get them to move their computing to the cloud?--the founders respond that people have already moved their e-mail behavior online. So it could happen to productivity as well.
Like many other Web-based operating systems, it's a compelling demo but a confusing marketing pitch. The "you don't need your own computer" line doesn't work all that well when everyone has their own laptop already. Ghost is a very long bet. It is not a product for today (and it's still in early alpha testing anyway), but it is one of the most interesting Webtops I've seen, and more OS-like than most.
Glide
The second company, Glide, will showcase its new service on Thursday. Glide is more of Web application suite than a Web OS. It's more mature than Ghost, and more comprehensible to the average user today.
The new "Glide OS 3.0" is a fairly complete Web-based desktop, with a word processor, a presentation app, a spreadsheet, e-mail, calendar, media players, and so on. I was critical of the apps in Glide's early versions, but they do keep getting better. Glide also has a rights management system built into its system, which lets users closely control what happens to their documents if they choose to share them.
Unlike Ghost, Glide has an offline version, and a sync engine that keeps your online and offline files in lockstep. Glide works on mobile devices, and the offline apps works on PCs, Macs, and Linux devices.
The Glide desktop is a bit more polished, reflecting the fact that it's already in its third major revision.
Glide does not offer real-time collaboration, like Google Docs does, though.
These two suites show two different approaches to building Web-based app platforms. Ghost is a glue app--really more like an operating system than a suite, since the idea is that you run your favorite apps through it, and use it to manage your file storage and sharing. Glide is an app suite--the Microsoft Office of Web apps.
Glide has a full app suite. Its word processor is shown here.
Of the two projects, the Glide direction is more comprehensible. Users get that it's a competitor to paid productivity suites. Ghost is far too novel an idea for mass adoption; and I do worry that by the time users are ready for it, its strongest capabilities--data transfer and universal online storage--will be typical features of online apps. But it is, still, the more interesting idea and the bigger bet.
Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to gingerly explore online extensions to its core suite. And although I have been known to complain about the glacial evolution of the architecture of its application suite, in truth it's probably moving at close to the right pace to keep users onboard.
Microsoft could not do Glide today. It wouldn't work for its business. And it certainly couldn't do Ghost (although it's possible that Microsoft Live Mesh [stories] is an early move in this direction). But these new Web-based operating systems do show us where Microsoft must eventually move because that's where many of its users will be going.
See also: Xcerion, Startforce, YouOS, EyeOS.
Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.
High on my list of New Year's resolutions for 2008, no joke: e-mail friends more often. Since time is a major constraint, I want my e-mail interface easy to get around, an enabler for quick composition. Write it up, send it out. These are the greatest drawbacks to GlideFree, Glide's beta Web mail release, which has over-enthusiastically swaddled some useful and even clever functionality in unnecessary layers.
For example, GlideFree simplifies the attachment process by bringing attachable multimedia options to you in a drop-down menu, rather than making you embark on the usual hunting and pecking expedition for the files scattered all over your directory. Bravo! Then it ruins the fun by forcing the recipient to open three separate browser tabs just to view an attached video.
And why, for instance, is there no field for simply typing in a destination address? Why must you click into the address book and add even one-time recipients, and then navigate an additional drop-down menu each time you select a repeat contact? In another head-scratcher, there's a short drop-down list of symbols in the beneficial built-in word processor--math symbols. Somehow it was determined that users would favor the 'not equal' sign and Greek 'beta' to accents, tildes, and trademark symbols.
... Read more
UPDATE: Glide is postponing the release of the Glide Crunch spreadsheet tool for a week. An updated version of Glide Crunch, contained in the Glide Sync download, is estimated to be available November 15. This version of the article also corrects a detail regarding how the Glide Crunch feature is downloaded.
This week, Glide (reviewed) is adding two new features to its beta Web suite, which is already 15 apps deep: Glide Crunch, which is a spreadsheet app, and support for OpenOffice.org.
Glide Crunch. Wednesday, Glide launches Glide Crunch, a spreadsheet app to join its word-processing, image-editing, and presentation-building buddies that sync information between the desktop and most mobile devices, including the iPhone.
Glide Crunch is a local and Web-based spreadsheet app.
Like these, Glide's spreadsheet contains collaborative tools to share, edit, and chat about data. Why this app is not like the others: It peels away from the nearly strictly Web 2.0 nature of Glide's other apps and settles onto the computer's hard drive as part of the Glide Sync desktop download. Spreadsheets with advanced formulas and functions can be crafted online, or offline with Glide Crunch Local, then auto-synced between the two. Pivot table support is anticipated for November 21. Glide Crunch spreadsheets were designed to be compatible with Microsoft Excel imports and exports. Check back tomorrow on CNET Download.com to download Glide Crunch.... Read more
The Glide home / file browser is very impressive for a Web app.
(Credit: CNET Networks)On Tuesday I covered Scrapblog, a very impressive service for creating personal presentations. Scrapblog is one of those very rare online applications that almost makes you forget you're working on the Web and not a desktop. It's not as fast nor as capable as desktop applications can be, but it's close. And here's another service that aspires to the same thing: Glide 2.0.
Glide 2.0 is a great-looking and ambitious Web suite full of day-to-day applications, including a word processor, a site builder, a photo editor, and much more. Most of the applications are very nicely designed and work well, if somewhat more slowly than ordinary software applications do. New to the suite are a presentation program and a Web site builder. Both are impressive, if not best-of-breed.
Glide's secret sauce is that it can synchronize data from your local PC or Mac to make it available anywhere you have Web access--including a mobile phone. It's an impressive trick. Glide will let you edit files and photos from the browser in your Treo or Windows smart phone, and it will stream videos and music from your account, too.
Glide's new presentation program is simple to use and makes nice online slide shows.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I didn't like the last version of Glide, and while this release fixes many of the suite's previous problems, especially the last rev's too-creative user interface, I still have reservations about Glide. It demos extremely well, but when you dive into it you realize that different applications in the suite have different user interfaces, and they're not all up to the standard of a modern suite like Microsoft Office, nor are they as simple as a barebones online suite like Google's. Collaboration tools are also missing. Also, Glide uses a variety of Web technologies, from ordinary HTML to AJAX to Flash, which contributes to feeling that you're dealing with a hodgepodge of apps instead of a well-integrated suite.
But It's worth checking out if only to see how the future of online applications is taking shape. I still find Glide ultimately an unsatisfying collection of applications to use, but I'm hooked on the vision, and I really like the way it lets you access so much of its richness--even from small mobile devices. I just hope version 3.0 is more coherent.
See also the online suites from ThinkFree and Zoho.
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