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Download Squad Week in Review

DLS logoBeen so busy waiting for your American Airlines flight to actually take off that you haven't had time to catch up on the week's other news? Wait, that doesn't make sense. You've had nothing but time on your hands. Aww, whatever. Here are some of our favorite stories from the past week. No excuses necessary.

Flickr launches video uploads

We've been expecting Flickr to add a video upload feature to the online photo sharing site for some time now. But we never would have guessed that when it finally arrived, Flickr users would be limited to uploading videos of 90 seconds or less. Flickr's justifying the move by saying the clips should be seen as long photos, not YouTube-style content. But that hasn't stopped Flickr traditionalists from forming and anti-video group and starting a petition asking Flickr to withdraw the feature.

Organize your music collection with TagScanner

Have a few thousand music files scattered around your hard drive and need a good way to organize them? While iTunes, Windows Media Player, and several other music players will help you edit your music's metadata to add things like artist names and song and album titles, TagScanner is probably the easiest music tagger for Windows we've ever seen. And it's free to boot.

Continue reading Download Squad Week in Review

ThinkFree Office: Powerful, familiar office suite for Windows, Mac, and Linux

ThinkFree Write
Office suites like Google Docs and Zoho Office have been busy adding offline access to let you access and edit spreadsheets, text, and presentation documents in a web browser whether you're connected to the internet or not. But paying ThinkFree customers have had this ability since last year.

That's because ThinkFree offers two products: an online, web-based office suite and a Microsoft Office-compatible suite for the desktop. Users can synchronize data between the web service and their desktops. But up until this week, users had to pay $50 for access to the desktop software. Now, as expected, ThinkFree has launched a free version of its desktop software.

Now, here's the interesting thing. You don't even need to sign up for an account to download the desktop software. So if you have no need for an online office suit, synchronization, or 1GB of free online storage space for your office documents, you can just treat ThinkFree Office as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, or whatever you've been using. But you will need to sign up for an account since ThinkFree will only save files if you have an account. Files will also automatically be saved to a ThinkFree folder for synchronizing with the web service. If you don't want to synchronize your files with the server, just never login again.

The applications can open and save documents in a variety of formats including Office 97 - 2007, PDF, RTF, and CSV. ThinkFree Write, Calc, and Show also do a great job of opening documents we've created using other applications, recognizing features like notes in our spreadsheets that other free tools like Gnumeric miss.

Study: 73% of Americans have never heard of Google Docs

We spend a lot oNPD studyf time talking about Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Zoho, and other online office suites. For the most part they don't have all the features of Microsoft Office, but they attempt to make up for that in convenience (access them from any computer) and price (usually free). But we've always had a suspicion that most computer users have never heard of these web based office suites. And if you believe a recent NPD survey of 600 PC users, we were right.

According to the study, 94 percent of US computer users have never tried a web based productivity suite. More than 20 percent say they've at least heard of Google Docs or other suites, but have still never tried them. And only 0.5 percent of users say they've replaced Microsoft Office with an online office suite.

So while online office suites are perfectly serviceable replacements for Microsoft Office if you don't need advanced formatting options or other fancy features, the simple truth is most people just aren't ready to let go of Microsoft Office. That makes Microsoft's online Office strategy a bit more understandable. We may have slammed the company for failing to offer a standalone word processor, spreadsheet app, or presentation platform online, (Office Live Documents simply provides a way to access documents created on your desktop from the web), but Microsoft isn't worried about the competition from Google, Zoho, ThinkFree, or anyone else at the moment. Not in the short term anyway. Office Live Documents is just a new bonus feature for many users, not an alternative to Google Docs.

Google PowerPoint clone coming soon?

PresentlyGoogle's much kind of anticipated PowerPoint clone could be almost ready to see the light of day. There've been rumors that Google was working on a slideshow application for ages.

In April, Google bought one company with presentation technology, and another in June. Also in June, Gmail added the ability to view PowerPoint slides sent as e-mail attachments. But while the company has an online word processor and spreadsheet app, presentations have been a no show so far.

Well, rumor is it's coming soon, and it'll be called Presently. Which is kind of funny, since once upon a time Google bought up a web service called Writely and renamed it Google Docs & Spreadsheets. We're guessing Presently is just a temporary name.

We should point out that Google will hardly be the first company with an online office suite that includes a Presentation application. You can already open PowerPoint files or create your own slideshows using Zoho and ThinkFree. But neither of those companies has been nominated as a potential Microsoft killer just yet, so all eyes are on Google to see if a mover and shaker can release an online productivity suite that will truly rival Microsoft Office.

ThinkFree launches a file Viewer for WordPress, and a Flickr for Docs

thinkfree viewerThinkFree has launched a few different ways for people to startup their own little applications and mashups.

We covered the company last year when it returned from the dead and began offering a web based application suite. ThinkFree now has a plugin available that was released yesterday that gives Wordpress bloggers the ability to drop in MS Office documents, spreadsheets and presentations that can be viewable even if the end viewer does not have the associated Office or Acrobat applications installed. This opens up the ability for bloggers to drop in a powerpoint presentation into their blog posts, or embed excel spreadsheets of information.

The company has also announced their Viewer API which gives people the opportunity to create mashups and applications using the Viewer utility. ThinkFree wants to get the ball rolling with web service companies who they hope will create mashups and applications using the utility. With the API, designers can integrate Viewer files, doc's, xls, or ppt files directly into an online application, giving end users, regardless of Operating systems or plugins, the ability to view files.

ThinkFree is also working on a document exchange product called ThinkFree Docs that has been described as a Flickr for Office files. Through this new location ThinkFree will enable content creators to read, share, get feedback, and source office documents. There is a demo up online now, but the actual site will be up with a redesign in the near future.

Peepel Online Office Suite

peepel online office suite

Could this online office suite steal people away from the popular Google and Zoho? It seems far from likely that Peepel will ever take market share away from the online office application space. However, they might look a little amateur, but a lot of development work has gong under the Peepel hood, showing how serious people are indeed trying to get into this space.

Peepel has just announced their beta release for their online office suite of products that are currently not running head to head with Google, Zoho and Thinkfree. Peepel's suite includes a spreadsheet, calculator, word processor, help system, and a file manager. The Peepel workspace manager is a feature that saves the desktop as you have left it, and will open with everything where you were when you login the next time. A Task manager lives on the screen and shows everything that is open and active. In Peepel, users can have many different applications and files open at once, all overlapping in resizable windows. The big claim to fame by Peepel is the claim that they are the only competitor offering a true multiple window system in an online desktop, and not just a bunch of stacked popups. Some neat features, but nothing out of the ordinary that is going to make users want to switch.

Aside from the fact that there is currently no importing or sharing files, as well as limited storage sizes, Peepel does have a very welcome offline work mode. It's not up to standards with their competition, but if they are serious about success, they do have potential to grab a tiny share of the market space. We will hold off on storing any major files here yet, but our radar will be following Peepel's further development.

ThinkFree Office has new features

ThinkFreeI got an email this morning from ThinkFree Online (office suite) detailing the new features therein. On the off chance that you didn't get the same email (or spam-filtered it) here is the scoop: Quick edit is a new feature to compliment "Power Edit", meant more for drive-by writing than the whole 7-course meal, also easier blogging features are built right in now. ThinkFree office also is now available for download in the Server 1.1 version, in addition to the web-based and desktop clients. ThinkFree is also holding an iPod contest, for those who explain how ThinkFree has helped their business. These new features have made ThinkFree better since we last saw it here on Download Squad.

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