ThinkFree Apps to Get Bigger and Better
Nick Gonzalez
14 comments »
ThinkFree CEO TJ Kang will be giving a presentation later today at Ajax World, talking about Ajax applications and the future of ThinkFree’s online document, spreadsheet, and presentation quick editors. In April, ThinkFree will be releasing new version of their Ajax architecture that will more accurately and efficiently handle uploaded documents, particularly Microsoft’s.
ThinkFree’s new architecture picks up where other Ajax editors break, large file sizes and preserving the uploaded file formatting. As an example for the document editors, files like this one on ThinkFree currently break Google Doc and Zoho Writer. Google chokes on the 1MB file size, and Zoho Writer jumbles the formatting (see here).
Google tries to keep the file size small (512 KB) to keep accessibility wide, because Ajax editors have to accommodate browser memory limitations. Zoho doesn’t have as low a file size cap, but if you edit a large document in it’s editor, you can watch your browser’s memory usage jump as you add more content (particularly images). To get around these issues ThinkFree will be using four tiers of storage when the new version is fully implemented. On the client side, ThinkFree will just store the data that the user is most likely to need in the browsers memory and cache, with the rest waiting in their server memory and hard disks.
To better handle presentation issues, ThinkFree tracks formatting made to uploaded Microsoft files, which can’t be reliably emulated in Ajax editors. CSS turns out to be really good at doing layout, but a beast when it comes editing tricky formatting such as text spilling over into multiple columns or images anchored to text. To work around this problem, ThinkFree keeps track of the documents formatting when uploaded, warns you if an edit will break the document, and reapplies the MS formatting upon download. You can see more technical details within their presentation.
While the changes will be most noticeable when their document editor switches over, ThinkFree will also be revamping their lagging online presentation product, adding a WYSIWYG Flex editor.
ThinkFree currently has over 250,000 registered users with 10% of those using their application at least once per week. Although they also have a more powerful online JVM file editors, the Ajax versions are more frequently used. In the near future, power users will be able to use a lighter version of their desktop editors to manage and sync their ThinkFree documents online.
ThinkFree is also almost a year into a three year deal with Korea’s largest search engine, Naver, (which according to Kang accounts for 67% of Korea’s search traffic) to handle their user’s email attachments within their browser.
Cool! We used Thinkfree to extensively to share documents in the early stage of our business.
Looking forward to seeing what’s new in there!
hmm…the sample document seems hopelessly broken on Thinkfree too and not just on Zoho…the content is jumbled up and many parts are overlapping each other…Thinkfree needs to fix this before taking up the challenge of retaining fidelity in the Word-Thinkfree-Word round tripping scenario…
I can’t even believe these services are marketed like they are with those kinds of limitations. Not that it’s the hottest issue to me, but the 512kB limit is a joke.
Saved me the time of ever checking them out though, so that’s a plus.
I have experimented with everything, google docs, goffice, approver, Zoho and Thinkfree. I’m a big fan of ThinkFree using their current “power edit” mode. It’s just like using MS Office… Also check out viewer.thinkfree.com
Nick: could you send the url of the original document?
I’m trying to replicate your misfortunes with Zoho, ThinkFree and GDocs.
http://www.vtsbdc.org/BottomLine040104.doc
Interestingly, this DOC also breaks OpenOffice’s rendering.
Zamzar converts it to PDF without problem, probably because they’re using Word itself. It looks like they are using e-pdfconverter.com virtual printer to print the DOC to PDF.
Anyway, since OpenOffice doesn’t render it, I’m not surprised that Ajax-based online editors also do a poor job.
Nick: ThinkFree also has issues rendering your document.
http://www.vtsbdc.org/BottomLine040104.doc
Try it, you’ll see that one of the cell that should be shown on the second page appears duplicated in front of a cell in the first page. Really ugly and unusable.
Strangely, both OpenOffice and ThinkFree exhibit the same rendering problems. Which one stole code from the other
Nick :
Thanks for raising this. I apologize that we do a poor conversion on complicated documents like double columned ones, documents with Objects linked via OLE , etc. We do have this in our roadmap and will be working on editing, importing and exporting complicated documents down the line.
Thanks,
Ranjith
ZohoWriter
Laurent,
I am not sure what happened to the document you were looking at. It appeared fine in testing it out the other day, maybe I need my eyesight checked;). Obviously we have work to do. But, let me point you to another one that illustrates our point - http://www.mphasetech.com/xDSLTVwpaperv_20.doc.
The issue you raised is a somewhat complex one in that we actually offer three different technologies - document conversion, AJAX and Java. The technology used in previewing the document online converts the document from .doc format to HTML. Quick Edit (AJAX) and Power Edit (Java) use the document in the original format - .doc.
Our Power Edit offers the highest level of MS Office compatibility available. But even there it definitely isn’t 100%. I don’t think Microsoft could even claim 100% compatibility between different versions of Word. The new version of Quick Edit Write makes a lot of improvements in that area.
As for stealing the code…We have been working on Microsoft Office formats since 1999 working directly from the source. So, if any code was stolen I know it wasn’t us;).
Thanks,
Jonathan
ThinkFree
I really appreciate all you guys stopping by to chime in on this. I’m sure we can expect a lot more from the Zoho and Thinkfree teams.
This document was a surprising point of comparison I hadn’t really thought of before.
In the long run, online apps will have to deal with larger data sets in a fast efficient manner, be they Ajax or not.
Sorry to repost - i just noticed the link in my previous comment had a period attached to the end.
http://www.mphasetech.com/xDSLTVwpaperv_20.doc
There that should be better.