Webware

UPDATED: Corrected Opera's country of origin.

E-mail and RSS feed improvements top the list of changes for Opera 9.60, moved out of beta today for Windows and Mac. As noted when the 9.60 beta came out last month, this version of the free browser offers up a multifaceted ''low-bandwidth mode'' for Opera Mail and tweaks to the RSS reader.

Updates to Opera Link let users synchronize even more settings.

(Credit: Opera)

The feed preview rolls into Opera's RSS management a standalone RSS app feature so that users can preview feeds before subscribing to them. The low bandwidth option for Opera Mail, also called M2, does different things for different kinds of accounts. Accessible under the Mail option on the Menubar, POP users will see messages truncated to the first 100 lines of a message, while IMAP users will find that it restricts downloads only to new messages. Both strip out attachment downloads unless otherwise specified.

Both accounts will also benefit from the new Follow/Ignore option. Ignore sets a contact's e-mail to never download, and Follow does the opposite, always downloading messages from a specific contact. Ignored contacts' messages are not deleted, just left on your server. Users are expected to manage their own account size limits, though.

Further improvements have also been made to Opera Link, the browser's synchronization service. It now supports synchronizing typed history and custom search engine preferences. This means that if you've typed something into the search or location bar, you can now sync it to any computer that you're using.

The full changelog can be read here.

Egnyte is a new business groupware application that's rolling out at the Web 2.0 Expo. It's entering a very crowded market--the product is can be put in or near the same buckets as business wikis, groupware apps such as Groove, Sharepoint, and Collanos (review), and pure Web 2.0 apps such as Basecamp--but at its most basic it's a file synchronization engine.

By the way, it's pronounced like "ignite," not like "egg night."

Egnyte views appear as little boxes with lots of options.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Egnyte lets you designate directories, individual files, and e-mail folders for sharing. You can collect several items into a "view" (for collecting resources on a particular project, for instance), and invite people into that view. The files and e-mails that you put in a view are then automatically uploaded to Egnyte via a small client application, and they remain synchronized with their original files on your computer (PC, Mac, or Linux box). When other users work on the files, their changes are synced back to you.

It's reminiscent of Tubes (review), the simple peer-to-peer group file sync product I covered in January. But one big difference between Egnyte and many other personal sync engines (such as FolderShare and BeInSync [review]) is that Egnyte keeps historical versions for all files. That means that if you put a PowerPoint presentation into a view, a colleague modifies it, and you don't like the new version, you can easily find and reuse your older one.

Each file and view also gets its own micro message board, which is useful to discuss resources in the system. The system also shows you how files are related. For example, if there's a document that was sent as part of an e-mail discussion, you can find that discussion. A similarity engine lets you find items related to each other even when they are not directly linked.

Inside a view, you can do a lot (too much) with your files.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The app is free for individuals, with a 1GB storage limit. Since all files on Egnyte are copied to the system's central servers, storage limitations matter. Pure peer-to-peer systems like Collanos don't have this sensitivity. Corporate versions go for $30 a month per user, with 30GB of storage (or $15 a month for 15GB of storage). Those prices are too high; that's $360 a year per user, which is more than a full productivity suite at corporate rates. The company will also sell you software so you can put the data behind your corporate firewall.

Besides price, the other big downside to Egnyte is usability. I got lost more than once when I was experimenting with the product. To take advantage of Egnyte, users will have to spend time learning its concepts and terminology. In the Web 2.0 world, that's no longer acceptable. It needs to be obvious how the service works right away. Yes, synchronization is a tough concept to explain. But that's not our problem, is it?

This is an interesting tool but it needs to be made more accessible, in more ways than one.

Tubes, a new app going public Tuesday, is a peer-to-peer file-sharing and -synchronization system that can make it very easy to distribute files among multiple users and computers.

It's the application I've been looking for to solve this real-world problem: Every other year, my wife's family gets together for Christmas. This past December, her four siblings and their families gathered in her parents' house in Baltimore (the family doesn't believe in hotels, so it was cozy). There were eight digital cameras in operation. After the holidays, we all scattered back home, and the great photo archive of our time in Baltimore fragmented.

A series of Tubes

(Credit: CNET Networks)

With the Tubes app installed on all our computers, we could simply all drag our photos into our shared Baltimore Christmas folder, and we'd all have access to all of them.

I tried it, and it works as advertised. Once set up, you can create as many "tubes" as you want and share them among your own PCs or with friends, family, and so on. Any files you drop into given tubes are replicated to the other machines. People you invite can be given read/write access or just be set up as readers. Those who have write access can add and change files, and those changes will be synced back to all subscribers.

The Tubes synchronization engine works in the background when a PC is online. When a PC is offline, its users still have access to all the files in its tubes and can continue to work with files in them and make changes. When they go back online, the files are synced again. If there are conflicts, Tubes copies all versions of a file.

In addition to my test case of sharing group photos, Tubes could also be very useful for geographically distributed workgroups and as a repository for files created by consultants for their customers.

It's cool because it works. It's easy to use. It appears quite robust. The replication engine means that when subscribers want to open a file, they don't have to download it--it's presumably already copied on to their machine. And Tubes even makes a cute pneumatic tube sound when you drop a file in it.

Tubes files work just like Windows directories.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

But there are snags. For one, it's Windows only, which is a real bummer if anyone you know is on a Mac or Linux box (this makes Tubes a nonstarter in my test case, since two people in my wife's family are Mac heads). And while the app itself is smallish, it requires the latest .Net framework, which is so much of a beast to install that I could not in good conscience point my less PC-savvy friends to the application.

Also, Tubes makes copies of all the files you drop in it, so if you're going to put a bunch of photos in a tube, you'll need to remember that the versions in your My Pictures folders are not the ones in the tube. This is a good security measure and good for communal work spaces, but it might be confusing for some users. (To share folders directly, you can use FolderShare or BeInSync.)

Finally, there's no chat associated with a tube, which seems to be a missing feature. It'd be nice if people could leave notes in a tube when they made file additions or changes.

Once there's a Mac version, Tubes could become a powerful collaboration and sharing platform. There are also other shared and online storage products worth looking at if Tubes sounds interesting to you: see BoxCloud, Box.net, Omnidrive, Pando, and Sharpcast.

The makers of ThinkFree, which gives away online alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, are planning to sell premium, Web-based software by the end of the first quarter of 2007. ThinkFree will charge between $5 and $10 per month for its premium online edition, letting you synchronize files saved to the Web with the work on your desktop. Does this mark the beginning of the end of the free ride for online software? Not really. ThinkFree's downloadable software will remain $50, while the current ThinkFree Online will become the Basic Edition and won't cost anything.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

As other companies hawking online office software, such as Zoho, are building bridges to Microsoft Office 2007, ThinkFree seems to want its users to abandon Microsoft Office altogether in favor of its own suite. I wonder how well this strategy will work for ThinkFree. Its Java-based, online edition (left) has some great features, but it takes ages to open files. ThinkFree for the desktop is pretty good. It costs one-third of what the most basic edition of Office 2007 will cost, or one-eighth the fee for the beefier Microsoft Office Professional 2007.

However, if you paid ThinkFree up to $120 per year for the premium version that synchronizes files, then the total price of ThinkFree's desktop and online apps would surpass the $150 for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 by $20. Instead, you could just make a practice of uploading your office work--at no price--from your desktop software to ThinkFree, Zoho, or Google Docs online. Would you pay for a service to synchronize your online and hard drive documents automatically--or would you rather skimp and just upload and download by hand?

(Credit: Sharpcast)

On that note, building a bridge between the Web and your desktop seems like less work for a software company than reinventing an entire software suite. I'm still waiting to try Sharpcast's Project Hummingbird, which is due for beta testing early next year. This service is being built to let you synchronize all sorts of files--office work, photos, videos, and music. So far I like Sharpcast Photos, which lets you store pictures on its servers as well as on your desktop and handheld device. Edit a picture on your Windows Mobile 5 smart phone, for instance, and Sharpcast applies the changes everywhere else that image lives. Support for Macs rolled out to Sharpcast Photos this week, which offers a free trial until the end of January.