Zoho Writer Gets a New Look

AdventNet, the company behind the bulging Zoho suite of productivity services, was one of the first to build Web apps that looked and behaved like traditional software–and it’s gone on to play an industrious, intrepid David to Google’s Goliath in the world of online office suites. Today, it’s given its flagship Zoho Writer word processor a major makeover, with a new interface that combines aspects of Microsoft Office 2007′s “Ribbon” interface and the more familiar menus of older Office versions into something that’s distinctive in its own way.

Zoho calls this MenuTabs, and simply put, it lets you get access to a set of commands–such as tools for inserting various elements into a document–either as a menu:

Or as a tabbed toolbar of icons:

Me, I’d go for the menu every time: Unlike Office 2007′s ribbon, which sports sizable, reasonably easy to decipher buttons, the Zoho toolbars have tiny icons that require a moment’s thought to decipher. The menus, on the other hand, explain functions in plain English. But it’s cool that Zoho lets you choose between the two approaches. (When Microsoft introduced the Ribbon, it did away with menus in their old form.)

Zoho has also upgraded Writer’s sidebar, which gives you access to files you’ve created and lets you perform tasks such as renaming them, moving them to the Trash, and sharing them–including bulk actions on multiple files in one swoop. It’s a nicely done, highly convenient feature, and I wouldn’t mind it a bit if both Google and Microsoft swiped it.

I’m currently trying out the new Zoho Writer in the only fashion that really matters: by using it to do some real work. More thoughts as I have them, but for now, I’m enjoying reacquainting myself with it.

5Words for March 5th, 2009

What I’m reading this morning:

Twitter-like makeover for Facebook.

Ballmer: Windows Mobile needs work.

Amazon’s selling used video games.

Pogue slams Samsung’s Memoir phone.

Facebook spurns poor Ms. Batman.

Fab Four meets Rock Band.

Spy shots of new BlackBerry.

Windows 7′s revamped UAC: useless?

Vista SP2 available for download.

Interesting, nitpicky Safari 4 review.

The T-Grid: Kindle for iPhone vs. Kindle 2

Until early last week, there was one Kindle e-reader–the original one. Now there are two: Amazon’s Kindle 2 and the app for the iPhone and iPod Touch which the company released last night. They have one huge thing in common: 240,000 electronic books, mostly going for ten bucks apiece. And beyond that, the two Kindles have remarkably different sets of upsides and downsides. After the jump, we’ll compare and contrast.

Continue reading this story…

iPhone Gets Major League Baseball Audio. Be Afraid, Sirius XM. Be Very Afraid.

I’ve written a fair amount about the annoying post-merger state of Sirius XM satellite radio, as well as chatted about it with folks offline, and nearly every time I’ve expressed frustration, I’ve said something to the effect of “if it weren’t for baseball, I’d consider dumping XM and just plugging my iPhone into my car stereo so I can listen to streaming radio apps.” And I’m sure there are other folks who feel the same way.

Looks like that “if it weren’t for” will soon be inoperative. My friend Jason Snell of Macworld has blogged that the upcoming 2009 edition of the MLB At-Bat app for the iPhone will support Gameday Audio, allowing baseball nuts to tune in their hometown broadcasts (that would be the Red Sox for me) on the phone. As Jason writes, MLB At-Bat costs $5 and PC-based Gameday Audio costs $15 a season. But you gotta think that there’s no scenario in which Gameday Audio on the iPhone won’t cost far less than I’m shelling out for XM.

Is anything else that’s exclusive to XM so lovable that I’d keep the service to get it? I’ve grown sort of fond of the Siriusly Sinatra station, with its shows hosted by Nancy Sinatra and Jonathan Schwartz. But I think I can tune in Schwartz on an iPhone via his WNYC gig, and I suspect I can find enough standards music on the iPhone to keep myself entertained.

Oh yeah: I also have to figure out the best way to let my car stereo–which lacks an AUX port–tap into the iPhone. I have terrible luck with wireless FM transmitters, and have been using something called an FM Direct adapter that lets me connect my XM receiver directly to my car’s antenna. It works wonderfully well, but I don’t know if there’s anything comparable that’s iPhone-compatible. (if not, there should be!)

One way or another, though, I suspect there’s a good chance I’ll be an ex-XM subscriber come opening day.

Nvidia Might Get Into the x86 Business

It’s more than a rumor but less than a fact: Nvidia is apparently considering branching out from its core business of making graphics processors to make system-on-a-chip products that combine a CPU and a GPU on a single chip at some point in the next few years, putting it in the most direct competition imaginable with Intel. The theory–and it certainly sounds plausible–is that SoC designs that pack both a powerful CPU and a powerful GPU will come to dominate the market, leaving a graphics specialist such as Nvidia in a tight spot.

Plenty of companies have tried to compete with Intel over the years; nearly all of them have failed, leaving only AMD and VIA (the latter of which specializes in basic chips for basic devices) still in the game. As a consumer, I love competition, so I hope Nvidia goes for it. Anything that gives Intel reason to be paranoid should help Moore’s Law work its magic of more potent technology at better prices. And if any tech outfit has the combination of ambition, tech chops, and craziness to dive in at this point, it’s probably Nvidia.

Home Storage: Important. Also a Challenge.

[A note from Harry: Our Digital Media Central guest posts continue with a few thoughts about storaget from Dave Altavilla of PC enthusiast site HotHardware. It's not as simple as it used to be.]

These days, the ever-growing library of files, documents and multimedia content for the average home user, family or small office, is not just bulk media that needs to be backed up.  Beyond ensuring redundancy and resiliency for the data itself, file access, file management and file distribution need to have higher levels of sophistication.  Gone are the days where you just mount a NAS (Network Attached Storage) volume as a mapped drive on your client machines and workstations.  Oh no, dear ol’ Dad needs to play around with pics of the kid’s football team and needs to look at them “Flickr style” or he gets confused.  Little Johnny wants to stream his iTunes up to his bedroom.  And Mom, she just wants that QuickBooks data backed up nightly because if she loses it again, Dad is going to be in the dog house for a very long time.  Finally, and actually of primary importance, all of this precious family data needs to be secured and have varying levels of user access rights.

Seven Tools to Make Your PC Smile

You have an insatiable need for free tools, I know, and there’s no reason to deprive you. I have seven gems for you, and all but one are freebies. Plus I have a quick follow-up about passwords and security.

Dump the Dupes

You think you might have a couple of duplicate files on your system? (Don’t be silly — of course you do.) Easy Duplicate File Finder (see image) is a handy freebie that will dig around and show you where they’re lurking. I like being able to choose specific folders, use a mask to find only certain files, and either rename or move dupes.

Continue reading this story…

I Gripe, Orbitz Reacts. Sort of. Well, Not Really. But at Least They Noticed.

A couple of days ago, I bought an airfare-and-hotel package for a business trip to Las Vegas, and was annoyed by the way the travel merchant tried to slip a $14 bus ticket and $19.50 travel insurance plan into my order even though I hadn’t asked for them. An Orbitz customer-serve representative (who asked not to be named) saw my complaints and gave me a call. She didn’t make me happy–because she couldn’t explain, really, why it’s appropriate to put unasked-for things in a customer’s shopping cart. But she did provide some background.

The automatic addition of a $14 bus fare, she told me, is a recent addition–and it’s one that Orbitz is only tacking on for Vegas and a few other destinations. She said that those locales have been singled out because most hotels don’t offer shuttle-bus service. (Which explains why you might offer bus pickup and dropoff…but not why you’d charge a customer for them unless that person specifically asked otherwise. After all, I don’t know of a single hotel anywhere that tacks a shuttle-bus fee onto your bill.)

“I can understand why you wouldn’t like that–’hey, I didn’t even want this,’ said the rep sympathetically. But she told me that Orbitz has received very few complaints about the Las Vegas bus fee, and that some of the company’s competitors were similarly adding charges.

As for the travel insurance, the rep said that it’s mostly offered on highly restrictive plane tickets which are hard to make changes to without penalty–often international flights. The insurance allows travelers to get refunds even if the airline won’t oblige. Again, fair enough–except for the part about having to notice the fee and sidestep it if you’re not interested.

“I don’t like it myself,” she said of the automatic insurance. And she added that travelers should read the policy carefully, since it doesn’t cover some stuff she thinks it should, like airline bankruptcies.

I was irritated in part because the Orbitz site has fine print telling you that you can’t get a refund on the items you didn’t ask for in the first place. But the rep said that if you accidentally ended up paying for them and called right away, Orbitz would help you get a refund.

She also told me that she felt my pain, but that Orbitz wasn’t trying to scam anyone (note: I didn’t say it was) and that the policies I found so offensive weren’t going away. And then she backpedaled a little–she said that Orbitz appointed a new CEO in January (Barney Harford) and that he was a “high-tech” guy who wanted simplify the process of buying travel from the company. Who knows, she said–maybe he’ll change things.

We can only hope–but I still think that maybe it should be the FTC, not Web merchants, who get to decide what’s appropriate here.

A Final Bell Tolls for the Original Xbox

Microsoft discontinued out-of-warranty repairs for the original Xbox this week, giving a sense of closure to the company’s first stab at video game consoles. If you don’t have a warranty and need something fixed, you’re on your own; perhaps it’s time to upgrade.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this — after all, Microsoft stopped producing the console three years ago, and software is mostly relegated to bargain bins at Gamestop — but it’s a sad day when a company decides that keeping old hardware up and running is no longer worth the trouble.

Thing is, I never found the Xbox to be a particularly endearing console, especially compared to its competition. The Playstation 2 is still a workhorse, putting out new games and transitioning from hardcore platform to family gaming device. Trading mine away just to get a taste of Halo feels like a soulless maneuver in retrospect, a cold means to an admittedly addictive end. The Gamecube, to me, was the unsung hero, hosting some incredible first-party games — Metroid Prime, Super Smash Bros. Melee, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, to name a few — but getting a bad rap for being technically weak.

Ultimately, the best original Xbox games became compatible with the Xbox 360, rendering the first console worthless if you owned both. The same could be said about the Gamecube and Wii, but here’s the difference: The Xbox is downright ugly, and a space hog to boot. There was little to lament when I cleared it out of my entertainment center years ago.

And yet, it’s still getting a fair amount of play in the U.S. In 2008, the first-gen Xbox was actually more popular than the Playstation 3 in terms of playing time, though I’m sure this year will be different.

I want to finish this requiem with something profound, but there’s not much else to say. Unlike the many other consoles I’ve owned through the years, the Xbox just isn’t one to get nostalgic over.

5Words for March 4th, 2009

San Francisco’s too rainy today:

Apple layoffs? Supposedly not true.

Will Washington prohibit iPhone exclusivity?

Windows 7 for Netbooks: dicey?

Disney might take on iTunes.

Nvidia reaps Mac desktop windfall.

IE: Nukable from Windows 7.

Hackers mock Apple’s Safari browser.

Office 14 beta? Fairly soon.

Obscure, good Microsoft Web services.

Sprint’s Treo Pro: March 15th.

Julius Genachowski tapped for FCC.

California legislator: blur Google Earth!

ZillionTV Shows NBC, Fox’s Hand

Now it makes all the sense in the world while suddenly Boxee is no longer good enough for these two networks. Both NBC Universal and 20th Century Fox Television are equity stakeholders in ZillionTV, yet another set top box offering.

Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, and Disney also own a stake in the company. About 40 other providers have agreed to provide content, with discussions ongoing with Viacom and CBS.

The service is provided through something called a ZBar and is free of charge. It’s not completely free though: users will have to fork over a $100 activation fee and sit through advertisements.

In an attempt to get you to actually watch the commercial, points will be awarded for each one viewed. Its not immediately clear exactly what these points would be redeemable for.

Visa is also a stakeholder in Zillion, and would run the payment processing backend. The service would allow users to purchase content to skip ads, although it would not be stored locally. Content with Zillion would be stored in a “locker,” and streamed to the user when requested.

I feel really bad for the boxee folks. They had a good product going, but apparently partners like NBCU and News Corp. were working behind the scenes to undermine their work. I doubt with ZillionTV on the horizon that boxee ever gets Hulu back now: why would these two companies cut into the business of their own product?

Kindle for iPhone: Disappointing. Yet Still Amazing.

First the bad news: In multiple ways, Amazon.com’s new Kindle reader for the iPhone and iPhone Touch falls short of being the ultimate iPhone e-book application. It fails to replicate all the major features of  a $359 Kindle device. It’s on the rudimentary side in certain areas. I found one or two instances of issues that were either quirks or outright bugs. I’d love to see a book reader for iPhone that was as polished and functional in its own way as the phone’s iPod software–and this isn’t it.

Despite everything, it’s a delight to have Kindle on the iPhone. What makes Kindle Kindle isn’t software as much as it is content–240,000 books’ worth of it, by far the largest collection of e-books ever assembled. Getting access to those books on a phone is by far the biggest deal in content for Apple devices since Apple itself added moves and TV shows to the iTunes Store. And given that there are far more iPhones and iPod Touches on the planet than Kindle devices, this could be a bigger moment for electronic books than the introduction of the Kindle in 2007 was.

Continue reading this story…

Yup, Your iPhone Can Be a Kindle, Too–Starting Now

It may not have been inevitable, but it was a darn good idea–and it’s extremely cool to learn it’s reality, not just wishful thinking. Starting tomorrow, Amazon.com will be distributing a free iPhone application that puts Kindle e-books on the phone, giving owners of Apple’s handset access to by far the most comprehensive source of commercial published works. Not only will books you’ve bought for a Kindle be available on the iPhone, too, but stuff like your location within a tome will travel between Kindle and iPhone (a feature Amazon calls Whispersync).

What a win-win-win-win situation–it’ll be a boon for people who own both a Kindle and an iPhone, for people who own just an iPhone, and for Amazon and Apple. I can’t imagine that Amazon will lose a single sale of Kindle hardware because iPhones can double as Kindle readers–if you want to read dozens or hundreds of pages at a sitting, you’ll want the large screen and marathon battery life of a Kindle device. But the iPhone makes more sense when you’re out and about, sans Kindle, and want to kill a few minutes by dipping into a book.

You gotta think that Amazon may end up selling not only more Kindle books–the number of Kindle-compatible gizmos in the world will skyrocket tomorrow–but also more Kindle readers, since some iPhone owners will be more likely to spring for a reader once they’ve bought and enjoyed books on their phone.

I imagine everyone will take the fact that Apple okayed the Kindle application for the iPhone as evidence it’s not getting into the e-book biz itself. Probably. But not definitely. For one thing, I’m not sure if even Apple would nix an application in a market it hadn’t yet entered unless it clearly violated it developer agreement. For another, is it utterly unthinkable that Apple might come out with a jumbo iPod Touch for which book-reading was one significant application…and work with Amazon, who has more knowledge and contacts relating to books than Apple could ever develop, to sell the content?

[UPDATE: It's available--if you've got iTunes, click here and you'll go to the app. More soon...]

[UPDATED UPDATE: Here's my review.]

Microsoft Plans to Profit from Piracy with Office Web Apps

After countless attempts at suffocating software piracy, Microsoft has accepted it as an inevitability–one that it can profit from. The company intends to deliver an ad-supported edition of Office 14 in an attempt to draw illicit users into its revenue steams, Silicon Alley Insider is reporting.

That is not to say that Microsoft has abandoned the fight–it’s just thinking outside of the box. Today, at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference, Microsoft Business Division president Stephen Elop told attendees that an ad-supported version of Office could provide Microsoft with an eventual upsell opportunity with pirate “customers.” It would also diversify its revenue streams, he said.

Over the past two years, Microsoft has pushed ahead with its Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) program. OGA requires customers to validate their licenses in order to receive updates and add-ons. The program met with resistance from some customers when their paid software was flagged.

Those measures, while helpful, have apparently fallen short. Last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Wall Street analysts that piracy drained Office sales more so than competition from Google Apps, OpenOffice.org, or any of its other competitors.

“We offer services through Office Live today that take advantage of both ad-funded and subscription offerings. As we announced last year at PDC, we will deliver Office Web applications, which will be available with the next version of Office, to consumers through this service. We have nothing more to share at this time,” a spokesperson said.

Microsoft has pushed the dial enough toward enforcement direction that a new direction is warranted–paying customers won’t accept more inconvenience and intrusion. I’m not certain that splattering a Web-based version of Office with ads is going to eliminate piracy altogether, but it will provide an alternative to unauthorized copying that could reduce its occurrence without markedly affecting Office license revenue.

Playstation 3 Movies Surprisingly Successful

While there’s much fawning over the Xbox 360′s streaming Netflix service, it appears that Sony is doing quite well distributing movies on its own over the Playstation Network.

The story in Variety notes that Sony has made $180 million on “pieces of digital content” — more than 380 million downloads in all — since the company brought TV and movies the Playstation 3′s online service last summer. Praise for both Microsoft and Sony follows, saying that they “may have achieved something of a breakthrough as studios try to figure out the digital age.”

It seems obvious that the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are prime candidates for digital distribution onto televisions. With total worldwide sales easily topping 20 million for both consoles, the install base is already there. Plus, a lot of it is that golden 18-35 demograhic, particularly with the PS3. They’re downloading “The Dark Knight,” “Iron Man” and “The Pineapple Express” in mass quantities, Variety says. Of Sony’s digital offerings, the company says 65 percent are purchased, and the rest are rented.

I never expected video on demand to do as well on consoles as this report suggests. My money was always on free streaming video sites like Hulu to swoop in and offer content gratis. With the exception of YouTube, that hasn’t happened, and Hulu is having it’s own distribution issues right now.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t seem like the studios need those other services. If people are willing to pay for on demand video over their consoles, why offer it for free?

Eye-Fi Adds Video Support to Its Cards

These little memory cards are the sole reason why when I upgrade my digital camera, I’m going to made sure its SD compatible (My current one’s a Fuji, so it takes XD cards). Eye-Fi has now added video support to these cards, as well as upgrading them to SDHC technology.

Two new cards would join the lineup, the $79 Share Video and the $99 Explore Video. The Share model would upload videos to any of 20 sites automatically, while the Explore version adds geotagging, much like the original two models did.

Eye-Fi will keep its 2GB Eye-Fi Home and Share cars , which would drop to $49 and $59 respectively. These are only capable of transferring pictures, with the Home only to your home computer and not any sharing sites. The Explore version would be discontinued.

I think this is a great move for a company that has a unique product. With online video now becoming so popular, having a way to automatically upload your videos just makes good sense.

All the new cards are available today, and can be purchased from Eye-Fi’s website.