Wonderful AJAX Office Tools
Ajax 13, a very young startup from San Diego, has developed an impressive collection of very, very sweet AJAX Office applications:
There are a write app as well as a spreadsheet tool which, if they want it to be successful, will surely have to try hard competing with Google’s recently “hyped” Docs & Spreadsheets.
However in addition to that they also have a presentation tool (ajaxPresents) that — judging from my first impression — looks and feels pretty much like the big standalone applications, Powerpoint and OpenOffice. It can also export and import these two file formats, which makes it a brilliant tool to edit presentation slides on a computer where you happen not to have an office suite installed.
But there are even two more on the list: A drawing tool called ajaxSketch (conveniently exportable to SVG) and an online MP3 player called ajaxTunes (if I see it right, it’s Flash, not AJAX, but ah well).
All in all this seems to be a very interesting company to keep an eye on; and I would not be surprised if they made it on the list of Google acquisitions some time soon — just like Upstartle, the company which produced the tool Writely, now part of the aforementioned Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
December 19th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
dont get your hopes up, it isnt the kind of web application that fits google: it’s xul based, it doesnt make any sense to run it online since it depends on a gecko engine.
December 19th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
Very interesting; I didn’t even notice that. Most likely because I am using Firefox. But I think you are right: Gecko-only is not what Google wants to buy, it seems like.
However, I like their software anyway!
PS: Since I am not a Google stock owner or similar, there are no “hopes” involved here
December 19th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
In fact there are still some competitors in the market competing with Google in online office, EditGrid is one of them which is full of innoviation as well~