Glide OS Present

After seeing Google's presentation software attempt, I thought to myself "this is because it's on the web, they can't really make it too sophisticated". Then I heard about Glide OS having a significantly more sophisticated presenter that can take out MS PowerPoint. I signed up for Glide and gave it a try. I will share with you my first attempt at it.

First glance will tell you it's far more advanced than Google's. A right click of the mouse will tell you that it is Flash based. I'm a fan of Flash and it's capabilities, it's a very powerful system, no doubt. The presenter is features-rich, yes, but it takes some getting used to. I had a hard time figuring out how to control the slides and the text. It differs from what I'm used in PowerPoint. I don't know why they decided to make it different, I want things to work the way I'm used to them working, I don't want to re-learn everything from scratch just to use your system. I got frustrated and decided to come write this blog instead of struggling with it and postponed creating the presentation until a later time. You will hear about that in a coming blog entry, so stay tuned.

My thoughts are that Glide provides a good presenter, but it will take a little time to master it. Google need to improve their presenter and they need to make it easier to use than Glide and PowerPoint. I look forward to finding a true replacement for PowerPoint, which I never liked, and I hope that replacement arrives soon.

4Shared Desktop

I previously wrote about some issues with 4shared Desktop application. I have downloaded it onto another computer and it seems to be working without any problems. It says it's the same release, but I doubt it. It has not given me any real errors so far. There was this one file that it would not upload using the synchronizer, but it handled it pretty well using the regular upload.

Great job 4shared folks!

Publish Post

Glide OS

Here's a step that seems to be in the right direction as far as Clouds are concerned. Glide OS is an ad-free platform that runs from within your browser, on almost any system. Including mobiles. Glide runs on "Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm Pre, Symbian and Windows Mobile" - Glide website. Glide provides a set of applications, such as office tools, presentation creator, image editor, and more. Included is a huge amount of free online storage to store your created files. Glide also allows you to store your files locally, unlike Google's Chromium OS, which has only an online option. They also provide a Sync app to synchronize your home and work files. With access from anywhere, especially mobile, this sounds like it could be the best offering thus far.

I just signed up for their free account, I will take it for a spin and write some more. Their free account gives you 30 GB and their premium account is 250 GB for $50 a year.

Check them out here if you're in a hurry to get started:

http://www.glideos.com/

Til next time...

4shared Desktop Sync

I discovered that 4shared Desktop software's synchronization feature is great and can be used to sync directories and subdirectories in a really nice way. And I discovered it has some bugs as well.

For starters, one of the folder's subfolders that are in my local sync folder were "taken out" of that folder and placed in the parent directory on the server. I wish it took all of them out of that folder or the rest of the subfolders out of the folder, but no, it was just this one folder, and it even took out the subfolders within the subfolders and placed them in the parent directory. That is some twisted programming!

I was synchronizing a big folder, I think about 2GB. It took a while to analyze it and to upload the files. It did not finish in one session and it resumed after I restarted the computer. This is great, I love smart software that doesn't need to be retold everything. I was happy and relaxed that my sync operation is in good hands and that Desktop will do all the work and I will have my backup safely in the cloud. Cloud number 9, as it turns out. I come in one day, open Desktop to check on my files and operation and the upload list is empty and the sync job has been deleted. I refresh and double check and look here and there, even under the carpet, for my sync job, and it is no where to be found! Typical smart software. Now I have no idea what's uploaded and what's not and no idea how to proceed(maybe by finding a new service?)

Til next time...

4shared.com's Desktop Application

4shared is an online storage and backup site, offering both a free service, and a premium, paid service. I've been using the free service for a few weeks, and I'm pretty impressed. I especially like the features of their desktop app, which acts, among other things, as a synch manager. It supports drag and drop to upload files, downloading is straightforward as well and you can set up synch jobs. 4shared desktop remembers your upload list and your synch jobs, so you don't have to worry about losing any work if you shutdown your computer (not that anyone shuts down their computer these days).

4shared desktop is light on the system, it runs silently in the background, does not interfere with your screen much, except for a little notification down in the corner, to notify you when it has finished working on a file. I've mostly used it for uploads so far, so all I see from time to time is "abcfile.xyz was uploaded". I run it on a slow computer, and I haven't noticed any slow down while it's running, so Kudos to the developers on the performance.

That said, however, I have some issues that I've found and intend to report to the 4shared team. Most notable was the issue with uploading a folder and its subfolders by drag and drop. It accepts the folder, and asks if you want to create a subfolder on the server. After answering Yes, you would expect it to create subfolders for all the subfolders. This does not happen. It will create the first subfolder and all of its children, but it will not create any of its siblings. It doesn't stop there, it continues and tries to upload the files with the siblings, but reports an error that it cannot find the parent directory and stops. I thought this was frustrating, until I tried to delete the upload list and start fresh. I selected the entire folder and all its contents and pressed Del. I kept getting an error that didn't make sense, something about not enough disk space to complete the operation and an Ok button. I had to click Ok and Del several hundred times to clear the list (about 6000 files). I'm now creating the subfolders manually and uploading.

Overall I think it's a create service, great tool, 15GB free space, with a large file size limit, 200 MB per file. I think it's 500 MB for the paid service. Give it a try and let me know what you think. They offer an affiliate program, but I didn't sign up. I want to write to bring benefit, there are already far too many affiliated writers on the web.

Visit their site:

www.4shared.com

Revolution in the Making

Single computers are slow, have very little storage and cannot be considered truly reliable when compared to the monster machines available in the "Cloud". Compare your 2 GB RAM to the hundreds of terabytes available at, say Google. Compare a single copy of your files on a single hard disk (which is how big? One tera?) to the space available at data centers and to the backup available at these centers with their expensive hardware, qualified staff and standard procedures for backup and preservation of data. Did I forget your single CPU (OK, so you have 2 processors)? Compare that to hundreds of thousands of CPUs available to you online. There's no comparison. If you can do a lot on your tiny, single computer at home or office, imagine what you can do with the thousands of computers available to you online. And a lot of the features provided are FREE.

The features are provided to you through the concept of "Cloud Computing". The cloud refers to all the computers, their storage, and CPUs which are available online. Some of the features provided are backup and storage, simple apps, complex apps, and last but not least, sharing.

Online backup is provided by many companies free of charge for a basic service and a paid premium service. Some companies offer unlimited free storage. Other companies offer less storage, but more features. While it sounds a bit strange to store your information online, it also makes sense. There will be sensitive information that you will not want to put online, this is understandable. But there are many many more items which can be stored online, and even shared with the world without any privacy concerns. Most people already share photos and videos that are not considered private, yet their private collection is kept locally, and away from the rest of the world. The great thing about storing in the Cloud is that you can access it from anywhere, any time. From your home PC, office PC, mobile, or from a web cafe or friend's home. This comes in very handy in case of a hard disk failure, and who hasn't gone through that? I recently lost 3 disk totaling about 300 GB. True, I had a back up of the most vital of data, but I still lost some good stuff that I really wanted to keep. The Cloud could've saved me, but I had not known about these sites at the time. All I had known was that XDriver.com used to offer 50MB a few years ago, and I remember that they stopped this service a long time ago.

Another use of the Cloud is simple online applications, such as an online office. Zoho and Google Docs are good examples of this. I personally use Google Docs. It's free. Easy to use. Easy to start. It allows import and conversion of your current documents, spreadsheets and powerpoints. It provides export features as well. My most needed export feature is PDF. It also allows you to "Convert to PDF and email". And the best feature they provide is sharing and collaboration. For me, this is a great advantage over the traditional "Edit locally, attach in email, wait for reply" method. The online method allows your colleagues to see the changes almost in real time, point you to errors, or they can just fix the errors immediately. After finishing the document, a simple click of "Convert to PDF and email" will send the document to your customer, boss, or whoever it is intended for. All this for free, all you need is a browser. This is a huge plus compared to having an office suite and PDF converter which will cost you plenty and take up your already limited resources from disk space, to memory to CPU. This is not to mention the bugs often found in such software, or the inefficient use of memory. Try opening a small file, 1 MB, document in MS Word and view memory usage in task manager. Sometimes you will see 40 MB being used. For what? Try the same with Adobe Acrobat. I can't understand or justify the use of so much memory for such a small file. Let Google or Zoho worry about memory, not me.

More sophisticated features are available, such as distributed processing, where thousands of CPUs are used to make complex calculations. One such application is Google's Voice Search. Voice search requires voice recognition, which has not been really practical, even though it has been here for quite some time. Google has included Voice Search on mobile devices, where processing power and memory are very limited. Voice Search utilizes the Cloud for matching spoken words to a database of existing patterns, allowing it to give very accurate results in both recognizing the spoken words, and in delivering the most relevant results. This is done by comparing the search query to the most recent queries and providing the result based on what the many computers in Google's grid suggest.