Web applications

    As many already know (and who doesn’t know, he’ll find out now), for a long time I did not like various web applications that were originally on the desktop (mail client, for example). Now there are some circumstances due to which I have to change my mind ...

    First, let's talk about such simple applications (compared with the subsequent ones, of course), such as the mail client and the rss reader, in particular, Gmail and Google Reader . For starters, what motivated me to use them. There were 2 big reasons for this:
    1. Because I have repairs at home (and I was leaving at sea) - I constantly had to use various computers to work / surf on the Internet, etc.
    2. My global transition to Linux (more precisely, half global, on the second computer is Vista), due to which I could not transfer the backup information from my thunderbird in Windows to thunderbird in Linux.


    For these two reasons, I decided to use Gmail’s web interface as an email client until I find a way to return the data backed up. and you know what? It turned out to be very convenient, besides there by default (if someone is not in the know) letters are not deleted, but stored in the archive, thus the problem No. 2 was solved (there was no need to restore anything, everything was in place). In general, I’m not particularly picky about the mail client - the main thing is that there are 3 things: the ability to view incoming and outgoing messages, a normal search was implemented and it would be possible to conveniently compose letters. Gmail’s interface provided all this to me with a bang, it’s especially interesting to compare the implementation of search by messages. The one who did not use thunderbird I’ll say - the search turns into wild horror when the number of letters becomes quite large. He searches for suitable letters for a very long time and at the same time the computer slows down to horror. It’s as if I had come to terms with such a turn of events for a long time, until ... until I got Gmail - the search works instantly and nothing slows down at the same time.

    Of course, if you have the bat installed, or the same thunderbird with a bunch of plug-ins and you use all of these plug-ins and can't live without them - then Gmail’s web interface will hardly suit you, but for those who still have since Outlook Express or something else, but only because you like opensource (don’t like microsoft, like the logo of your email client, you got something installed and taught how to use it, you need to emphasize it ), then Gmail’s web interface is exactly what you need (well, or at least I highly recommend you try it :)).

    Yes, by the way, today I installed myself on the E61 java-applet Gmail, which is something like ... Let's just say that the application looks like Gmail’s web-interface if you access it from your mobile phone through the built-in phone browser, but it’s purely Gmail + is much more convenient than browsing the site from your phone.

    Next, about Google Reader. To begin with, for me in the rss reader one thing is important - how convenient will the window for displaying the messages themselves be presented. In Google Reader, message viewing is implemented as a separate frame (honestly, I haven’t looked at the code, but it looks like a frame), into which messages from the selected feed are loaded with ajax + old messages are loaded when you scroll down the frame. Settings - a minimum, but convenience at altitude. I also really want to note one very interesting fact that motivated me to switch from a desktop reader to an online one: Google Reader loads new messages from feeds not at the moment you open it, but on your own, even if you close the browser. What is the advantage? The fact that rss-channels usually store only the latest messages, but not all, and a certain number of them, regardless of the time of your last call. Those. if you subscribed to a feed in which new messages appear quite often, and for some time did not download new messages from there, then, unfortunately, when you download the feed you will receive only the last N messages, and all messages that came before them (but which appearedafter the last time you viewed the feed), they will be irretrievably lost to you (lost - in the rss feed, on the site itself you can still see them, but this is not about that). When using Google Reader, you are relieved of these problems - he will upload new messages to the server himself, and you, after returning, for example, a week later, after a vacation at sea, will be able to read all the messages that were written in the feeds you read.

    I can say very little about other programs that have switched (obviously) from the desktop to online. Google docsI didn’t use it much, I just opened documents in it a couple of times. I can notice that Google Word “eats” a fairly large part of the formatting from the source document, which is not happy, but there are no special reasons for worries - I am sure that the work is underway, and it is quite suitable for editing quite complicated things. I have never had to use the analogs of Excel and Powerpoint (and thank God I don’t like paper work). I would also like to note the online versions of the icq client, which, as far as I know, are already many. I tried to use Meebo myself, but, unfortunately, he is not very friendly with Asya, or rather not very friendly with the cp1251 encoding, which is still used in the Russian-language segment in most clients (as I understand it, it uses UTF-8, changing the browser encoding why didn’t save :().

    © FX's blog

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