March 21, 2007

Think Free Handles Large Documents Better

If you use Google Apps or Zoho you've probably found out by now that they don't handle large files to well if at all. This is because of the limitations of Ajax- the programming language these tools are made it.

If you want to do more online, but have been put off by the file size limitations, Think Free is coming out with an update to it service.

Tech Crunch reports Google tries to keep the file size small (512 KB) to keep accessibility wide, because Ajax editors have to accommodate browser memory limitations. Zoho doesn't have as low a file size cap, but if you edit a large document in it's editor, you can watch your browser's memory usage jump as you add more content (particularly images).

To get around these issues ThinkFree will be using four tiers of storage when the new version is fully implemented. On the client side, ThinkFree will just store the data that the user is most likely to need in the browsers memory and cache, with the rest waiting in their server memory and hard disks.

I've used Google Apps on several occasions and have been happy with its service.

What I do wish, is that more of these hosted application services would have an offline client that automatically synchs what you do offline with what you do online.

Microsoft's Groove does this quite well.

ZDNet writes that maybe my wish will come true!

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