* Peepel just doesn't measure up, aesthetically or functionally
I hate it when you find a Web Application that appears to have it all and then when you dive in you find things aren’t quite what they seem. This just happened to me with a new Web office service called Peepel.
When I first looked at Peepel – an Ajax-based windowed personal productivity suite with free membership – it looked promising. In its range of Web applications Peepel offers WebWriter (a word processor), WebSheet (a spreadsheet), Contact Manager (misnamed because it is for managing the sharing of files with other Peepel users), Notifier (shows messages left while you weren’t logged in), Browser (a Web browser window), and a calculator.
At a lower level there are system tools such as a file manager, a workspace layout manager, a task manager, and an RSS feed specifically for your account so that you can track changes in shared files and contact requests.
Although it could well be a matter of personal taste I find that the overall design of the Peepel interface is somewhat lacking. The task launcher is a huge Peepel logo in the upper left of the browser window, which doesn’t really look like it should do anything and takes up way too much screen real estate.
Down the left-hand side is the task manager that displays an icon for each open application while across the top of the screen under a single line status display is the Panel, effectively the menu for the application that currently has the focus. All together these functions use up a lot more screen real estate than they should and just don’t look polished. That said, these are matters of aesthetics and it is really issues of functionality that are where Peepel’s biggest drawbacks are.
My first complaint about functionality concerns the Contact Manager which only manages your contacts within the Peepel system. This is a real problem if you’d like to use Peepel as your office away from the office, as you have nowhere to store your non-Peepel contacts and there’s no external e-mail service.
Another issue is that the integration between the main applications (the word processor and spreadsheet) is non-existent even for copy/cut and paste with text.
I also found that the windowing system has some problems with occasional poor redraw performance and I noticed that the true extent of windows is not obvious – clicking in a window’s virtual shadow into a window that is behind doesn’t bring the backmost window forward until you are four or five pixels beyond the shadow – not intuitive at all.
Another issue is that windows that have resize handles but that don’t, for example, expand sideways look just like windows that do expand both ways. Again, not intuitive.
All of these issues are handled by other browser windowing systems such as one of my favorites, Winlike, which I covered in a previous newsletter, almost two years ago, so Peepel is really lagging in this area.
What these functional issues really add up to is a service with a few good ideas and some good marketing but in reality a rather weak offering. There may be some real value here in the future but the people behind Peepel have some serious work to do if they want to be real players in the online office market.
