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June 25, 2004
My thoughts on SimIndiana
I signed up for a SimIndiana account just because I was curious. Here's my thoughts:
Why do you have to select a state when signing up? This is supposed to be for Indiana residents only, right?
It never mentions that you have to use IE to signup. I originally tried in Firefox, but it always redirected me to a missing page when creating my account. So I switched to IE. But then it said the account name I wanted wasn't available, so it was still hanging onto that failed attempt.
It's a big download (18MB). I guess Indiana is getting this for free (why was Indiana picked?) for the next two years. Before they start paying for it, they should subsidize residential broadband. That alone would do a lot more than than offering services like this, which as Kyle said are often already available for free anyway.
If the state used Citrix, like they used at Purdue they could offer clients for non-windows machines. The benefit over Citrix is that SimIndiana is downloaded locally so it can be used offline.
SimCalc - a spreadsheet program, didn't have any problems open up a few simple Excel spreadsheets I had.
SimMail - email client, I accidentally left of the .com of an address I was sending mail to. When I hit send it warned me that it was an invalid address and then the email disappeared! So then I retyped the email and had the address right. When I clicked send this time it disappear again! It turns this one got sent, but it didn't show up in the Sent Items.
SimMessenger - looks like a basic messenger but since I don't know anybody else I couldn't test it. My SimIndiana name is mberger, IM me if you got it working.
SimPim - this launched into a really small window. I would guess it integrates into the other stuff (Mail and Messenger)
SimWord - this opened up a couple of Microsoft Word docs I had lying around.
SimExplorer - this lets you browse your storage area. This is where you can store all your docs about corn. I couldn't find out how much storage space is available, but this could be the most useful feature (to me anyway). Again, this piece in particular would be much more useful if everyone in Indiana had broadband.
Other than the storage space, you can pretty much get everything for free already with OpenOffice, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AIM, Windows/MSN Messenger. The best use will probably be if it's already installed on library, school, and other public computers.
Posted by mikel at June 25, 2004 12:29 PM
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