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Review: Glide Effortless
By Cade Metz
2006-09-01
Article Rating: / 2
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Glide moves computing toward a future where you'll access all your applications and data through your browser, not your local OS or hard drive.Glide Effortless is a glimpse into a possible future of computing, where users get their functionality and apps not through the OS but through their browsers. And its interface is almost breathtaking. The question is, will Glide survive alongside similar efforts from behemoths like Google and Microsoft?
Eight months after I first reviewed Glide Effortless, the service is even closer to the access-your-stuff-from-anywhere ideal that PC theorists dream about. Described by the company as an "online mobile desktop," it's a kind of Web-based operating system that lets you oversee everything, from e-mail and contacts to photo, video, and music sharing. The latest version of the overall suite, known as Glide Effortless, not only adds online word processor Glide Write, but it also dovetails quite nicely with a sister service for Windows Mobile devices, Glide Mobile, giving you access on the go. You open Firefox or IE, give your username and password, and up pops a remarkably dynamic flash-based environment where you can store, use, and share all sorts of data—from music files to Word documents.
The whole package is wonderfully elegant. Glide Mobile even impresses when it comes to handheld video. And with a new desktop app called Glide Sync, you can automatically synchronize videos, photos, music, and other files across Glide, Glide Mobile, and your PC's hard drive.
But I wonder about TransMedia's practice of taking your credit card number even when you sign up for the free version of the service. Over the past few months countless readers of my previous review sent me e-mails saying they promptly canceled their registration once the service asked for a credit card. The other issue is that the company seems more concerned with getting new tools onto the Web quickly than with perfecting them. Yes, the interface is breathtaking, but snafus continue to surface. With Microsoft offering Windows Live, Google serving up so many nifty apps (including the Web-based Writely word processor), and so many other Web services duplicating at least portions of the Glide arsenal, the competition is heating up. When the service first launched, the bugginess was understandable. Eight months later it's not.—The Current State of Glide
The Current State of Glide
Glide's basic design is still the same, but over the past few months TransMedia has tinkered with the interface a bit and added two new applications: Glide Calendar and Glide Write. The menus are cooler than ever. When they first pop up you are given a choice of just two or three tools. Then if you want more, click a second time and up pop a few more. And so on and so forth. Yes, this sort of interface takes a while to get used to, but once you've got the knack, it's a great way to navigate a computer screen.
One small complaint: The interface doesn't handle dialogs as well as it should. Let's say you've just deleted a photo from your Glide photo collection. A dialog asking for confirmation—"Are you sure you want to delete the select item?"—pops up at the top of your browser, nowhere near the file you're trying to delete. If you're a new user, you might not notice the dialog, and you'll assume the delete failed.
Glide Calendar app does its job, letting you track appointments from any browser and share appointments with other Glide users. But the most welcome addition is Glide Write, which lets you open documents and edit them inside your browser. Don't expect this to completely mimic Word—when I opened Word documents with embedded comments and the like, it couldn't handle them—but it handles average doc files with aplomb. Otherwise it's very similar to Word; it looks and performs in a remarkably similar manner. Write can spell-check but won't help you with mangled grammar, it does have a thesaurus. You can have a reasonable amount of control over your documents' look; you can change styles and fonts, but there are no multicolumn layouts. When you're ready to output the document, there's no hassle, as Write uses the browser's printer drivers. Except for issues with embedded comments and very complex documents, Write should be interoperable with Microsoft's word processor.—Glide Mobile and Sync
Glide Mobile and Sync
I'm even more impressed with Glide Mobile, which gives you access to your Glide Effortless account from Pocket PC devices running Windows Mobile 5.0 (only the Treo 700w is officially supported). You can browse and open files—including songs, photos—even videos—with remarkable speed. TransMedia streams lightweight snapshots of your data as you browse and streams a file in full only when you ask to open it.
For instance, I uploaded a video clip of the first Ali-Frazier fight to my Glide Effortless account. As I browsed my Glide videos on a Palm Treo 700w, Glide Mobile showed me a still snapshot of Ali on the canvas. Then, once I hit Play with my stylus, the service streamed the video to my Treo and played it in full. You can also download files to your mobile device or quickly share them with other Glide users. Sharing is as easy as selecting files and recipients from a contact list on your device.
The new Glide Sync tool—an app you download to your PC—keeps files synchronized between your PC and your Glide account. That's handy if your Internet connection is down or for some other reason you don't have immediate access to Glide. But Sync also makes it easier to upload files to your account. You simply drag and drop them into a folder on your PC desktop, and they're uploaded to the Web in the background.
When I tested Sync, it was particularly buggy. Most notably, with each new sync it made duplicate copies of files I'd already uploaded to my account. But after I contacted the company, they promptly fixed the problem and posted a new version of the app. They've also promised to make Sync a bit more user-friendly. Right now, it's difficult to tell—in some cases—when synchronization begins and ends.
Though Glide is extremely impressive, it doesn't always run as smoothly as I'd like. After periods of inactivity, I had trouble accessing files via Glide Mobile, and I had no choice but to close the app and restart it. And I had similar problems with the upload tool on Glide Effortless.
Will the service be more stable in future? Maybe, maybe not. TransMedia has already announced that a new version of Glide—with a brand-new interface—will hit the Web in late September. We'll have to wait and see if this solves the problem—or makes it worse. Will you always have to provide a credit card to use the free version? That's up in the air too. Eight months ago the company told is it would soon change this practice, but it has yet to do so. Glide's full of potential, but it's unclear if it will ever be fulfilled.
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