The Coolest Gadgets and Widgets for November 2005
Move your “Office” to the web, a terabyte in a toaster, and a friendly Black Dog.
Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
Online Office Goes Live
The lack of a solid office suite hampered desktop Linux adoption for years, but offerings such as OpenOffice have rapidly closed the gap, providing a viable alternative to expensive commercial software.
ThinkFree (
http://www.thinkfree.com) has provided a relatively inexpensive ($49.95) Linux productivity suite for some time and is now taking the office suite out of the office.
ThinkFree Online is a 100 percent online,
Java- based productivity suite that offers word processing, presentation authoring, and spreadsheet calculations.
While probably not the answer for those buried in documents, tables, and slides, ThinkFree Online is a great option if you occasionally dabble with various documents or are constantly switching machines. ThinkFree Online keeps its files online, and the software works on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X,
ThinkFree Online takes a little while to start, but once it’s running, performance is not an issue. It’s a bit odd to work on a document in a browser window; nonetheless, the applications are quite impressive.
ThinkFree is currently offering free trials of the software — definitely worth a look for the casual office user.
Terabyte Toasters
Remember back in the day when you were the first on your block with a “gig” of storage? Nowadays, you need to have at least a terabyte (TB) before anyone takes notice. Or, how about two terabytes?
