ajaxSketch, a Web-base tool for diagramming, flow charts, free hand drawing was launched today. This came just a week after it’s creator, Michael Robertson released ajaxWrite, which became both instantly popular and controversial. Popular, since within a week it was used to creat over half a million documents. Controversial, since it sparked a debate that it’s actually not AJAX but XUL, so perhaps it should be named xulWrite…
I’m a dumb user, not technical enough to follow those debates … and I don’t care anyway. What I do know is that I now have a folder named WebOffice in my FireFox with bookmarks for Writely, Thumbstacks (cool online Presentation tool – light Powerpoint-replacement, although I will be chastised for this), Vyew, Box.net, Zoho, Calcoolate … and a bunch of others. Today ajaxSketch joined the crowd. I think I’m gonna lose this race: before realize, I’ll have way too many WebOffice apps there, when I really should “standardize” on a handful. Michael Robertson is a guilty
party here: he promised to release a new app on ajaxLaunch.com every Wednesday, and so far he’s delivered.
Update (3/29): Since the announcement this afternoon, the US server had scarce availability, the European server was up, but slow. Now that they got TechCrunched, it won’t help… Oh, well, when Zillow was unavailable almost all of their launch day, nobody seemed to care except me – apparently it did not hurt them a single bit.
Tags: WebOffice, Web 2.0, AJAX, AJAX Office, ajaxWrite, ajaxLaunch, AjaxSketch, Writely, Thumbstacks, box.net
Zoli,
After seeing your post I figured I would give Robertson’s ajax-y stuff another try [after last week’s debacle], but I haven’t been able to access the app despite repeated attempts.
Has the app been working for your consistently?
Jason
Jason, “consistently” would be an overstatement, I had no time to really play with it, it’s more the fact that it’s out that I welcomed. Just like Thumbstack (the PPT-replacement), which I only tested for 5 minutes, then proceeded to create a presentation on it before going to see a VC last week. It worked 🙂
Back to the subject: I’ve seen some references on another blog that after the announcement the US server was unavailable, only the European was up, but rather slowly. I guess it comes with being small but suddenly popular. Recently I complained about it with another startup where I definitely expected better, and guess what, the poor start certainly did not hurt them.
ajaxWrite and ajacSketch are Not True WebOffice Applications
I was one of the first bloggers to welcome ajaxSketch, released only a week after ajaxWrite, as part of my growing collection of FireFox bookmarks in the WebOffice folder. Well, I just deleted them. What’s the point of usi…