Failed Zoho

Image via Wikipedia

If you couldn't tell by my failure to get past the first week, Zoho didn't make the cut for me. I was fine working around anything I had trouble with, but I couldn't stand losing work. My presentation failed to load in class twice, and they were both irreparably damaged during saves and had to be reworked.

I'm OK with limited functionality. There's no reason to be "cloudy" if the major benefit of ubiquitous access isn't there.

Day 5: More Calendar Woes

As often as I hear people complaining about the Google Calendar, I'm having much more difficulty with Zoho's. Meeting times are in half-hour increments, and there are no settings to change this. I can't schedule my class at 9:10 or 10:40. The calendar can't work in my situation and I've had to move back to Google's calendar.

Not having all the apps in one place is really going to hurt Zoho's interest for me.

On the other hand, Google started offering offline access to the calendar yesterday. I noticed it when I logged in, clicked the link, and was finished. Zoho has offered offline access for its suite for some time, but I'm not clear on which apps that includes. I'll look into it.

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Day 2: Fire.fm, a Firefox Add-on for Last.fm music

I ran across Fire.fm when looking for a better music situation than I had the last time I went "OS-free." As the name suggests, it is a Firefox Add-on for Last.fm which will play artists and neighborhoods. It even does searches of past plays from the Awesome Bar. The setup is simple and it just works. Happy, happy me!

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Day 1: Impressions of Zoho

I had my first full day working in Zoho, mostly using the calendar and spreadsheet application, and I came to some conclusions:

• The interface is remarkably fast -- much moreso than Google's apps.
• The calendar is fancy, featuring drag-n-drop, yet it lacks certain advanced features that Google's calendar has -- namely, the repeating event dialog is much more limited.
• The event creation in the calendar isn't well designed. If I click the calendar in "Repeat until," shouldn't the radio button be selected instead of leaving the selection on "Never?" When I choose a contact under "Invitees," why should I also have to click ">>" to add him/her?
  
• The spreadsheet has some annoying bugs. It hung on my once. Row numbers don't line up with the rows themselves in some cases.
• The interfaces aren't similar between applications. I have the same complaint about Google. It makes sense that the name change dialog, for instance, should be the same across all the document-using apps. Writer has a tabbed document interface. Sheet doesn't. The other file functions (Open, Save, etc.) are also all in different places.
• Apps nicely remembers what documents I have open when I switch to and fro.
• Gmail doesn't like being in a frame, so it won't work when added as a Zoho app. Yahoo! Mail, however, does.
• Wiki is much less powerful than Google Sites is. Sites integrates well with other Google Apps, allowing you to insert documents, pictures, and videos (although it won't help you set the proper sharing settings on documents you share, possibly leaving the page blank...).
• I didn't spend a lot of time screwing around with getting the interface to work for me like I did with Google. The dashboard already does that for me.
  

I did some reading and watched some videos on the Zoho site. The marketing ("evangelist") team says that 2009 is the year that will see much more intergration between apps. Zoho needs this. For that matter, so does Google. I don't see any reason to have lack of integration in an on-line apps suite. You know that the user will have access to all the applications, and they are one platform -- they should present the same loon and feel, interoperate well together, and re-use as much information as possible. Google is half way down this road already, and Zoho is just starting the journey. I look forward to a couple of years from now, when the integration is complete.

Zoho offers offline use with Google gears, alread installed on my machine.

Off the topic of Zoho, I installed Open IT Online. The site says:
Thanks to Open IT Online users can choose to use different online services to open their documents and images: the most popular are Google Docs, Zoho and Vuzit for documents; Pixlr, Picnik and Snipshot for the images.
This Firefox add-on will help me with limiting my file manager use.

Technorati Tags     Zoho,GoogleGears,OpenITOnline

The Zoho Experiment

It's the first day of the new semester, and I've determined to do another 30-day test, this time with Zoho. The same rules apply as before --

• I'll do all my work online.
• I can't use any local apps other than a browser and a file manager.
• I should try to avoid using a file manager where possible and instead work with files completely online.
• I will prefer Zoho applications over other choices.

I expect that using Zoho will be easier than using Google Apps was because outside services can be added to the Zoho interface. I can't really switch to Zoho e-mail for all my work, so I'll still be using Gmail, though I'll try to limit it.

The first thing that I'll mention is how much more like an integrated application Zoho feels than Google does. I've been using Google Apps for over a year now, so I'm pretty used to it, but there's no real dashboard (iG doesn't make the cut). Zoho has a nice menu and even has the "desktop" which summarizes all your important information.

Zoho offers the following services in the "Personal" edition:

• Mail
• Calendar
• Documents
• Desktop
• Writer
• Sheet
• Show
• Meeting
• Wiki
• Tasks
• Notes
• Links
• Contacts
• Notebook

These are all descriptively named. I didn't originally get that Sheet was the spreadsheet, though I'll never forget that now, and I had to look at desktop to understand what it did, but the learning curve is very slight.

The applications all appear to be more like their desktop equivalents than the Google Apps do. This will make learning the new application easier, but I suspect that Google is embracing the online aspect of the suite more than Zoho is. Zoho's visually attractive aspect comes at a price with regard to the speed, too.

Since Zoho supports posting blogs from Zoho Writer, I'll be using that from this point on.

Posts:

• Day 1: Impressions of Zoho
  

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Answered Prayers

Well, It feels like an answered prayer, anyway. About a month ago, I submitted a suggestion to Google about videos in presentations. They had been using a custom widget to embed YouTube videos, but that didn't have the normal YouTube controls, didn't pause/resume correctly, and most importantly, didn't have the ability to pre-cache the video.

Sometime in the last week or so they switched to a straight YouTube widget. Much simpler. I know they probably got 8,000 suggestions and didn't respond to mine in particular, but it feels that way.

Day 30: The Google Apps Experiment in Summary

Well, it's over. The thirty days have passed and I'm still alive. It wasn't even that difficult, really. Sure, I felt pangs of desire for desktop applications, but I really believe that had more to do with working on a full desktop than anything -- it was like going on a diet with a cheesecake staring you in the face every time you open the fridge. I'm sure that I would have been fine had I been on a system without local applications.

I started with a set of rules that prioritized Google's apps. Then I tried to massage iGoogle into being my main page (later, I even tried to copy the Gnome menu structure). It didn't work very well. I prefer having GMail open with various labs in the margins. I had to figure out how to get past problems with picture editing and taking basic screenshots.

Looking back on the last month, I can pretty easily identify the pros and cons of living on-line.

Pros

Added features every week: Google added so many features during the month that I'm not really sure I can get them all. The list of what I can remember and/or look up is:

• Voice and Video in GMail Chat -- Not available yet on Linux. This is probably more due to Flash's failure to work with V4L v.2 than anything under Google's control.
  
• Google Docs and Calendar in Gmail via Labs: I think this may have gone live just before I started my experiment, but I'm not sure, and it's such a boost to my workflow in GMail that I didn't want to leave it off of the list.
  
• Task in Gmail via Labs: I spent half of two posts talking about how to get this functionality before it was added last week.
  
• SMS in GMail Chat: I can't use this since I don't live in a covered area.
  
• GMail Themes: I immediately disabled Better Gmail 2 and chose a tabbed-looking theme.
  
• Redesigned and Streamlined Reader Interface: This is nice, but I didn't hate the old one that much.
  
• Calendar Sync with Outlook: I don't use Outlook. I'm sure this is great for a large number of people, though, and will help Google's corporate adoption.
  
• Snooze reminders on your desktop with Google Talk, Labs Edition: This is Windows only.
  
• Holiday Docs Templates: I'm not into the holidays much, but there will be a lot of people who can now send invitations or cards through Docs.
  
• Forms Templates: I haven't used Forms yet, but I plan to get into it later, and this will be a big help for me since this culture is so oriented toward "cute."
  
• Improved Sharing in Picasa Web: I don't have any real private albums now, anyway.
  
• Widescreen by default in YouTube: Someone cares, I guess.
  
• SearchWiki: This and the Search Labs (by date, etc.) are great tools if you search for similar terms all the time.
  
• PDF Viewer for GMail and Docs: Got to love opening the PDF in GMail.
  

Some of these don't affect me at all (Outlook sync, for instance), but some solve my problem of how to get rid of local apps (PDF viewer). Overall, the pace of change is amazing, and there are so many optional labs that the experience is quite customizable.

No sync'ing worries: I never had a problem with a mising or outdated file. Not once in the whole month. That's pretty amazing since I forget stuff all the time. Because I'd given up all my privacy, I could search my work web history from home and continue without a hitch. Google Toolbar kept my bookmarks for use in my various locations.

Integration was pretty good: As I mentioned in my comparison of Google Apps vs. Zoho, Google's integration could be better, but everything still works together quite well. I'm able to convert e-mails to tasks or events. Sites can insert documents into pages, and the pages are updated when the documents are edited. It all works well enough, though I'd like to see better integration in iGoogle and a more consistent interface.

Cons

Privacy: In order to get any real benefit from going on-line, I had to give up a lot of privacy, which was really hard for me with my background. I don't like to give people access to my information. I don't let guests use my desktop log-in, even if there's nothing to find. Really, though, I trust that Google is large enough that they're not poring through my information and aren't really interested in anything I have to say.

Limitations: There are a lot of things that you can't do or which are significantly harder when you are using on-line applications. Photo editing is hard. The free editors were really limited. I'm sure that a subscription editor would have had more functionality (Photoshop.com?), but I didn't want to subscribe for just a month. I'm not a big gamer, and I tend to use my PS when I do game, but I still found myself playing a lot of sudoku this month.

The desktop apps that I don't want to do without are:

• Photo editor (The Gimp),
• Desktop Search (Deskbar),
  
• Music player (Rhythmbox),
• Movie player (Totem), and
• Virtual Machine (VirtualBox).

Honestly, that's not very many. I could do without the movie player by using a FF plugin, and I could replace desktop search with the Google Toolbar if I didn't have any local files. I don't see myself giving up the photo editor or VM ever, and the music player would need to be a sophisticated web app mimicing RB's interface. On the subject of music, though, I did find some new and great Jamendo bands this month.

Remote Files
None of my files are local. In some situations, this isn't such a big deal. The ones (like documents) that don't lose fidelity can be sync'ed using Conduit. Videos and photos in Youtube, Picasa, Flickr, and Facebook don't survive the trip well, though. I'm sure that this can be gotten around using premium services, though.

Internet Access
When the web is down, you don't work. Google Gears takes care of quite a bit of this problem, but it's not used in every part of Google Apps yet. For some people, this will be a huge issue. I live in an area with dependable, high-speed Internet.

Summary
While I won't quite say that the last nail is in the coffin of the desktop, it's not that far away. Gamers, designers, and developers will never move off of the local desktop, though, I'm sure. People who use a single computer get much from moving on-line.

There are a lot of benefits to being in "the cloud," and I'd encourage you to try it for a while to see how it can help you.

Note: I'l repeat this experiment in February with Zoho instead of Google in order to compare the two services. If anyone has a suggestion for me, please leave a comment and I'll try the web app/suite out.