ajaxWrite and ajaxSketch

Last week, I reported on the slow response from the online ajax based word processor ajaxWrite. Michael's Minute confirmed:

What was billed as a 6-second loading time became a minute or longer the first day and half until we could quadruple our initial capacity.

I tried this morning. Loading time is much better. I did not clock the first time from their American server. As I wrote this piece, I tried to time the time it took. I close my windows without clearing Firefox's cache and tried the American server again. This time, about 1 minute passed and I gave up. I then tried its European server. It took 6 sec for the splash screen to appear and at 43.20s, all the buttons and the sample document were loaded.

They announced the ajaxSketch as well.

Great for diagramming, flow charts, free hand drawing, and more. With a similar look and feel to popular drawing programs, you don't need to learn a new interface. Based on Ajax programming techniques, it is a completely web-based program with the quick response of conventional software.

I tried its American server and got some servlet errors. I tried the Europe server and got a splash screen at 4.5s. All the buttons and sample diagram were loaded at 42s.

My Fablusi client is also a javascript-power client side interface using AJAX-like communication technique with the server. (When I started writing Fablusi client, AJAX was not yet known to me, some how I have used very similar technique. Since I have my own set of working libraries, I am not ready to change to any AJAX framework yet.) It is also a 400K download. But I was able to compress the download to 90K! Not bad, right?

ajaxSketch is a simple drawing program. However, I did find one problem. When I tried to draw a polygon, there is no way for me to indicated the end of the polygon. Right-click is not checked! There is also no help menu!

ps: after checking the forum, the shape tool is stopped by double-click.

Hope to see some improvement in their updates.