Thread: Ajax Windows

Ajax has been the programming power behind various online word processing ventures, but the latest incarnation is Ajax Windows. Tn common with Edesk Online it features a Windows-style desktop in a browser. It runs without installation in Firefox, but IE users need to install a plug-in.

First impressions are of a well thought-out product there's a 'getting started' tour and video, buttons for feedback and bug reports and even a recycle bin. You get 1GB of free storage, and luxuries such as a personalised desktop. On the more serious side, you've got Ajax Write, Ajax Presentations and Ajax Sketch.
The word processor, Ajax Write, is a little more sophisticated than Windows Wordpad. It doesn't appear to have a spell checker though it does have tables, numbered and bulleted lists and you can insert in-line images. Despite the claimed ability to handle Microsoft DOC and Open Office ODT files, we found it was unable to open its own sample files in these formats, producing an apologetic error message about incompatibility. We also found new documents sometimes started with a string of gibberish, and that Ajax Write would often refuse to take any keyboard input - something of a handicap in word processing.

Ajax Sketch is a simple vector graphics program, with similar capabilities to the Microsoft Office drawing tool bar but without Wordart or gradient fills. For reasons we couldn't fathom we could only place shapes in the top third of the window, and since the help, as with Write, produced an empty window, we gave up.

On to the spreadsheet - except there isn't one - but you do get desktop icons for Google Docs and Zoho. Each of these icons opened a new browser window for the respective sites, where we able to sign in as normal. Ajax Presentations is again unlikely to win any awards, but it has the basics for creating and ordering slides, with a pane for speaker's notes. We found, however, that it suffered similar problems to Writer - a new file would sometimes start with strange code in the slide window, the program refused to take any input and we were unable to import a Powerpoint file.

Other icons also open new browser windows, with webmail, instant messaging, and Voice over IP via Gizmocall, for which you will need to buy credits. There are links to Googlemaps and Googlenews. where you can upload your photos and tweak them online. This last feature is rather good but, like the Zoho and Google links, is in no way integrated into the Ajax Windows environment.

There's ~ore in the start menu, but this again posed difficulties, as it tended to close before we could select an item. We did manage to start the Whoopee Cushion widget, which in retrospect was probably the most satisfying part of the Ajax Windows experience.

When you sign up, you are subscribed to two other services - Schedule World and Box - and this is where the Ajax Windows Syncwizard comes in. Your IE favourites, Firefox bookmarks or Opera bookmarks are uploaded to Ajax Windows, as is your Windows wallpaper, so you can access these from any computer. Your data, however, gets uploaded elsewhere, with pictures going to Box, contacts to Schedule World and documents to Zoho. Having opted out of the last three, we were somewhat surprised to see we had unwittingly uploaded a random selection of files and folders from 'My Documents' on our own Pc. Finally, Ajax Windows doesn't offer any means of sharing files with other Ajax users.