A fairly common practice for software providers is to provide older versions of their software for free as a taster to encourage you to go on and purchase the latest versions. This applies equally to online apps as it does to desktop - the delivery mechanism is different but the principal is the same.  But does it work?

Reading a story on the web recently I was reacquainted with the Softmaker products which are equivalents of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The story pointed out that Softmaker were offering a copy of their previous version of TextMaker and PlanMaker for free so I duly went off and downloaded a copy.

The first thing I did was to run a test to see how well TextMaker handled a Word document I have with complex paragraph numbering. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked perfectly, something that didn’t work in OpenOffice. What’s more I could also save a copy on my USB drive and take the apps with me wherever - the total directory size was a compact 36mb. Compare this to OpenOffice 3.0 which takes 286mb. This smaller size  makes SoftMaker ideal for use on my Netbook where disk space is limited.

Next arrived the inevitable email offering me the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version which also included Presentation for an attractive price of 22EUR reduced from 70EUR. That’s about £19 for a full office suite so I was tempted and out came the credit card.

The footprint of the new version has pretty much doubled to 68mb. This is mainly due to the addition of the Presentations application, but the total size can be reduced further by dumping the PDF manuals and some of the templates. It is still a very small footprint again ideal for the mobile traveller. Memory usage is light too.

So, to answer the original question, free can lead to buy and pretty quickly in my case. Thinking back I have also bought product as a result of older versions on cover mount CDs, Paint Shop Pro for example, and after using the free version of the web application Draw Anywhere. So as a business model it definitely does work but the ratio of freebies to paid, in my case, is still very firmly in the former camp.

Stories that caught my eye this week – 8th November 2008:

• Remember the Milk Gadget Puts Tasks in Gmail’s Sidebar [Gmail]
• Visualizing data in the cloud
• MSI Wind 9-cell spotted in the wild
• Gmail’s New Gadget Support Lets You Remember The Milk
• Remember The Milk for iPhone and iPod touch Now Available [Featured IPhone Download]
• Early Look at Firefox’s Private Browsing Mode [Firefox]
• Hey Microsoft, Yahoo thinks you should buy it
• The Top 10 Reasons iTunes Sucks
• Sci-Fi Giant Michael Crichton Dies at 66
• Revo Uninstaller: Hunter Mode Beats the Other Free Apps
• Find and Download Higher Resolution Videos on YouTube [YouTube]

You can see the rest of my reading list here.

Stories that caught my eye this week – 1st November 2008:

• Five Best URL Shrinkers [Hive Five]
• Introducing Google Earth for iPhone
• How Long Does Your Computer Take to Boot Up? [Reader Poll]
• The town in the cloud…
• New Default Groups for Google Contacts
• Microsoft to battle in the clouds
• Google Adds Gadgets To Gmail (Docs And Calendar)
• Google Labs Gets to Work
• First Look: Microsoft Office Heads Online with Next Release [Screenshot Tour]
• Bits and Bytes: FreshBooks, Zapproved, GatherGrid
• Building Your Online Credibility
• SMS in Gmail Chat

You can see the rest of my reading list here.

A while back I wrote about Microsoft’s Skydrive service which provides some storage in the cloud that allows you to access your files from anywhere. There are plenty of others (Lifehacker has a good overview of some of the main players) but I was taken by both Box and Dropbox as they provide access from the iPhone.

At their heart both services provide online storage (1gb and 5gb, respectively, for free with other paid options) which you can upload files to from a web browser. Once up on the cloud you can then access these files anywhere. Additionally Dropbox also has the ability to synchronise files to any machine that you have installed their client on but that isn’t necessary. Neither service allows you to view the documents online – they still have to be brought to your local machine to view or edit etc.

Box and Dropbox have taken slightly different approaches to their iPhone implementation with Box going the native app route with Dropbox providing web based access. In practice this makes little difference to the functionality available and, as you can see from the screen shots below, they look almost identical. The one additional feature that Box offers is the ability to upload files but given that is limited to pictures on the phone it is pretty limited and of questionable value.

One area that is going to be a concern is that of security and whether you would trust these unknown providers with your data. While both are accessed over a secure connection once the files are on their servers who knows who has access to them. I guess that this is just a straight consequence of understanding and living with the risks of cloud computing.

Having played with both solutions the Box iPhone app is much slicker than that provided by Dropbox but not by much and overall I will be continuing with Dropbox simply because it provides a much easier way of uploading your files through a familiar interface, in my case Windows Explorer. This also has the added advantage of enabling offline access on all machines that the Dropbox client is installed. Therefore it is a great hybrid offering online/offline and mobile access.

When I am away from the office or home I still want to be able to communicate from anywhere and these days that means from a browser. A while ago I moved both my home and work emails over to Google Mail which has allowed me to get my email from anywhere but, until recently, I hadn’t managed the same for IM.

Google Mail has had a Chat gadget on the right hand side of the workspace for as long as I can remember but as I am not a Google Talk user it was of no use to me - or so I thought. The technology underlying Google Talk is the same as Jabber which has a concept called “transports” that allows different platforms to communicate. Using an appropriate transport I was able to link my Google Talk account with my MSN Messenger account and send and receive messages. This means that I can now work on emails and carry on IM conversations without having to install any software or log in to more than one service.

As usual for any Google service it is neatly implemented and very usable. However, setting the transport up in the first place can be a little tricky and does require you to do a one time install on a PC to get things setup but, in my experience, it is certainly worth the effort. Now all I want is a browser based Skype…

More details on setting up a transport from here.