Lego is still cool!
Check this out, this must just appeal to a specific generation.
The Value of Sharing
I plan on writing a few posts over the next couple of weeks around Google docs, Google’s online document system, but to get started wanted to talk briefly about what the application is attempting to do.
If you think about the average document what normally springs to mind is something like a letter or a proposal and typically you would use a word processor to write it up. Something like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer are the normal tools you think of too. If you think a little harder though about the actual process you use for assembling a document you may be in a position where you need to move the document around your organisation/friends/family to finalise it… everybody needs to put their 2c in. The problem this presents is that you need to manage this process, you need to send it to each person and then get their responses back into the document. If your organisation is anything like ours then everyone does it in their own way too, some people just change the document, other’s might ‘mark up’ the changes for approval. Some people might add comments inside the document and finally others might just respond in an email with the changes they want made, ahhhhhhhh!
Google docs is designed to make this process of collaboration easier. When you are in a situation where more than one person is building the document then you can open up or share your document with other people and all work on it at the same time. Thankfully Google takes care of knowing who changed what and allowing you to track back through the changes.
It does by providing a web based interface to these tools, so using only a web browser you can open up a document, make changes, save and close.
Right now Google offer three different document types:
- Documents
- Spreadsheets
- Presentations
So your basics are covered.
Now some people talk about this being a replacement for Microsoft Office, I just don’t think that’s the case. The functionality in these applications is just not rich enough yet to compete with the offline tools. You get the ability to do a lot of what you can do in things like Word, but not enough to through away Word altogether. I think it’s a matter of the right tool for the right job.
If you don’t already have a Google account, you can get one right now and it’s free, and then you can start working online and sharing your documents.
Alarms Clocks
I was a little frustrated this morning at a hotel I was staying at in Sydney overnight. For the first time ever the alarm clock in the room was not turned off when house-keeping reset the room. So at 6.30 this morning I was woken by a badly tuned radio noise. Now I know 6.30 is not so bad and yes it could have been worse, but I had a wake up call for 7.30 and only got to bed just before midnight anyway, and I’m one of those people that once I’m awake it’s hard to go back to sleep.
Anyway I always read with fascination the alarm clocks that appear on thinkgeek.com (my favourite geek shop). Firstly, I wake pretty easily so I look at these clocks never with the intention of buying, just out of interest. Secondly I think this one takes first prize. They have built an alarm clock with a wifi connection, pre-configured to talk to your bank account. So the more you hit the snooze button in the morning, the more money it donates to a charity. I guess you can add to the incentive yourself more by adding a charity you don’t really like to support.
TripIt | We organize your travel
Through a facebook post I managed to get an invite to a service called tripit.com which is still in beta.
There are many services out there that will let you organise your travel with an itinerary. What I specifically like about this though is the ‘email it in’ function.
Here’s how it works:
- Book your travel on the travel website, like orbitz or hotel.com or whatever
- Wait for the email confirmation
- Forward it to a generic tripit.com email address
That’s it! The result is that the tripit.com engine parses the email, finds out who it came from through the email address and then maps this to an itinerary you have created in your account. Based on the dates for the booking it puts it directly into the right itinerary automatically.
My family and I are planning a big trip at the end of this year, and so we have all sorts of bookings, the ones that worked smoothly were:
- Alamo car booking
- Holiday Inn booking
- BaySide Hotel booking
It couldn’t figure out:
- Cruise booking - In fact cruises doesn’t seem to be something you can plan yet
- Qantas flights - I would expect that this would be the case, probably towards the bottom of the list of priorities
If you have a need for something like this then let me know, I have 5 invites left. Right now the service is a little slow in that it’s very ajax heavy and firefox struggles a little. Also it appears to be in US date format only. Otherwise, it’s a fantastic tool and worth getting to if you have a busy trip coming up.
Is Microsoft Catching Up?
I’m writing this post using something called Windows Live Writer. This is one of many new services offered by Microsoft under the new windows live platform.
There’s a nice post here that talks about the services available. But it begs the question of whether Microsoft if catching up on all this web2.0 stuff.
Above is a screen cap of the windows live writer application. At first I was confused in that I had to actually download this application. How weird? Then I thought “how weird that I thought downloading something was weird”. I guess I’m just so used to working with online applications that the concept of having to download an application to make a blog posting seemed foreign to me. But having downloaded it I kinda see where Microsoft is heading.
This represents one of a series of tools that you can plug into other applications or use independently. I must say that I’m actually really impressed with this writer, it has a ‘Save draft offline’ function which is nice, and when I first used it it walked me through a simple wizard where it connected to my blog and found out what sort of blog it was (wordpress in my case) and then actually showed me the editing window using the CSS of my blog. Cool!
There a bunch of ‘insert’ functions to the right that I guess will enable me to add more plugins to the posting, here’s a map as an example:
I guess in general I have seen a few things Microsoft have done recently that show me that they are finally catching on to some of these concepts, it’s a shame that it seems to take so long to get these things up and running however.
More to come on this topic.
UPDATE: You know Microsoft is changing when they build and publish a ‘Blog This’ add in for Firefox.
Sing Search
My wife and I just tried this out, and it worked 3 out of 3 times. You have to try it!
Basically, you hum a song and it finds it for you. No clue how it works.
Great Australian TV Guide… from Foxtel, who’d have thought?
I was by chance looking at the foxtel website recently in an effort to see what movies were on on the weekend, and found that they have a new flash based tv guide.
I was actually amazed to be honest. The guide is fast, easy to use, can be filtered, and has all the detail of the programming in one window. It has an ajax style interface although relies exclusively on flash to deliver the result.
Right now it seems to only have foxtel channels however it has an accomodation for free-to-air channels but nothing yet populated.
I will be using this from now on, definitely worth a look.
Cool Interface!
Just been to the qantas.com website to have a look at travel dates for April. Normally I would say ‘i have to travel on the exact date’ however in this case I looked at the ‘flexible with dates’ option.
The interface that was returned presented a matrix of the departure and return dates, with all the prices on one small table. Excellent! So i can look at the prices (all the same in this case) and then pick a combination of departure and return dates with one click.
Well done qantas.com
Interesting and Easy
Interesting liitle tutorial Jennifer found, it tells you how to setup a standard web camera so that it becomes a motion sensitive recording device. It even has an option to upload the images to a web server/ftp site so you can check out what’s happenning remotely.
Really Slick Screensavers
Check out the above site, there are some amazing free screen savers!
I especially like helios and cyclone, but they are all excellent.
I love it when someone with a passion does this sort of quality work, and then distributes it for everyone to use, it really embraces the sharing concepts of open source.