Love ya Google - Docs

Topic: Google Docs|Level: Beginner-Intermediate|Type: Informational

Another really great Google product I just recently had to start using; Google Docs.
http://docs.google.com

Google Docs is a completely free (naturally) web-based system for creating, editing, organizing, and sharing various types of documents.
Docs provide support for working with
Documents (like Wordpad or MS Office Word),
Spreadsheets (like MS Office Excel),
Presentations (like MS Office PowerPoint) and
Forms (as in data-collection Forms you can then link/email/embed for other people to fill out)

You can even Upload documents started in most other similar products and Google Docs will automatically convert them.
Documents: HTML, Plain text (.txt), MS Word (.doc, .docx), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw)
Presentations: MS PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps)
Spreadsheets: Comma Seperated Value (.csv), MS Excel (.xls, .xlsx) and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods)
and PDF Files.
And you can even Export any document out of Google Docs back to the various other formats for other applications if you need.

So not only is Google Docs a really nice way to create and maintain your documents online (so you can even access them from any where with Internet access), but you can even Share them! When you Share a document you can choose to allow the people you share it with (by email address or anybody who's given a special link) to only be able to view the documents or also be able to edit them. Multiple people can even be in editing the same document and the same time! And all the document types automatically have a revision history so at any time you can go back to view the document prior to any revisions. And you can set the document to send you an email notification should anybody make changes to it.

Love ya Google - Picasa

Topic: Picasa|Level: Beginner - Intermediate|Type: Informational

Google Account
Ok, first of all if you don't already have a Google account go get one. Once you have your Google account you can use all their many products with your one account. Even if you don't use their email (even though they do web-based email by far the best) you can still use whichever other products (iGoogle custom homepage, Picasa, Orkut, calendar, documents, blogging, notebook, G Talk, etc) you want with that one account.
(But if you're still using yahoo or hotmail/msn or any other web-based email service... just do yourself a favor, leave them as your spam email account and get a gmail account. Gmail even allows you to pull email from other POP3/IMAP enabled accounts to the Gmail interface if you do want to keep them around but not check 2 accounts. If you want more info about gmail see my Love ya Google - Gmail post

Picasa Parts
http://picasa.google.com/
Picasa is a Google product for photo (and video) management and hosting. There are two parts to it; the desktop application and the Picasa Web Albums.
The Picasa desktop application allows you to sort your photos in to albums, view, edit, label, caption, delete them, etc. There is even a Mac Beta version (http://picasa.google.com/mac/).
The Picasa Web Albums allows you to upload photos from Picasa (desktop application) to online Albums that you can then share.

Picasa Desktop Software
The Picasa desktop software has lots of features for sorting photos in albums, editing them, all sorts of things. The dekstop software also makes sharing any of your photos very easy. The buttons across the bottom allow you to Upload (to Picasa Web Albums), Email, Print, Export, send to a Blog, make a Collage or Movie/slide show, or even Shop for printing services (send your photos online to be printed and picked up in a store of your choice.)

To get any of your photos or videos online all you have to do is click the "Upload" button. A simple interface then appears where you can specify what album the item is uploaded to, size settings, and visibility of the item. Items that have been uploaded to the Web Albums will show a small green Up arrow in the lower-right of the image. If you edit an image that has already been Uploaded, after making your changes and clicking Upload again Picasa will change the existing online image to reflect your changes, rather than creating another image online.

Picasa Web Albums
Picasa Web Albums part is the online image hosting part of the service. Your "Web Albums" can be completely different from your desktop software's "Albums". You can have images in desktop albums but not in web albums, or images in web albums and not in the desktop albums. You can also choose to have an album in your desktop automatically synchronize to a web album. Using this option you can even have them sync, then manage and delete images through the web interface from anywhere, and when you sync your desktop again it will even reflect those changes on your local computer.

You can also select an image through the web interface, and in the "Edit" options select "Edit in Picasa" (if you're on a computer with Picasa installed), and selecting that option will download the image to the local computer, open Picasa to edit the image, and when you close the editor it will automatically upload the changes back to the web.

Your Picasa Web Albums can have different levels of being shared. Anybody can go to your Picasa Web Albums page (i.e. http://picasaweb.google.com/nickolashook ) and see Albums you have set for "Public" visibility. "Unlisted" albums anybody can get to if they're given a special link, but they do not show up on your Web Albums page. "Sign-in required to view" albums allow you to click a "Share" button, and specify people (from your Google Contacts or manually typed email addresses) that will be emailed a link to the album and then have to be signed in to see them.

Face Recognition
Another really cool feature of the Picasa Web Albums is it can detect faces in your photos and group the faces it detects to be of the same person. You can then specify who that person is (even pick them from your Google Contacts if you have them set up there) and then you can easily find all the photos of a particular person by simply clicking their name.

G1 > iPhone * 2

Topic: G1 & Android Cell Phones|Level: Beginner|Type: Informational

Ok, I'm not an iPhone hater... Quite contrary, I very much wanted one for quite awhile. But fortunately I could never get one in my area. And I say fortunately because I've found one that I love far more than iPhone.
iPhone set a new standard for smart phones and because of it's enormous market penetration any new apps are generally developed first for it. Given that, iPhone is amazing.

But if you're not an apple-head, or can't get AT&T or Cingular or w/e the "exclusive" service provider is calling itself now, or don't use a Mac/iTunes, I strongly recommend you check out Android (operating system) and the G1 (phone). Android OS (open source, developed by Google) will be coming to other devices (not just phones) and other carriers very soon, but is currently only available on the G1 from Tmobile.

But the G1 is very close and in many ways superior to the iPhone! Better camera resolution, removable micro-SD card for media, full QWERTY on-screen keyboard And slide out keyboard. And especially if you use gmail as your main email or google calendar because your email, contact list, and calendar are all completely integrated and synchronized to the phone, with 'push' email and updates to the device. Edit anything on the phone or computer, it automatically syncs to the other. You can also configure any POP3/IMAP mail clients to be received to your gmail account and thus sync'ed to your phone too. Or if for some reason the phone fails (though I know of nobody who has had any failed hardware short of dropping it in water or off a ledge to hard concrete), once you get it fixed/replaced all you have to do is sign in to your gmail account and all your email, contacts, and calendar are automatically resync'ed.
Also has full integration to Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, and Windows Live; full HTML & Java web browser; 3.2mp camera & camcorder

Or if you like Google Maps (regular maps, satellite maps, or even street view maps!!), they're completely integrated as well and with the phone's GPS and open source development there are some pretty amazing maps & location applications available for it too. ("Find me the nearest movie theater, give me show times, and now give me turn by turn directions to it")
And the phone even has a YouTube application built right in with very impressive quality!

As for media, the G1 is integrated with Amazon MP3 and Google Checkout for payment processing of songs or applications purchased in the Market. But you also don't have to have a particular application (iTunes) to get media in your phone. Sync via WiFi, USB cable, or load directly to the removable media card! And items purchased through Amazon MP3 are generally a bit less expensive than Apple Store and don't have DRM on them so you can transfer to PC, Zune, or any other device.

Another really cool thing, the Android OS also has something called "intents". Which allows an application with any piece of information to basically "announce" that is has some piece of info and any other application on the phone that can do something with that kind of info may take it and make use of it... For example, the Shazam application most people are familiar with can tell you what a song is and then "announce" that it has a song artist & title. Then the Amazon MP3 app can take that and take you to buy the song. Or you might use the "Places" application which uses your GPS information and online data to find places of interest (banks, gas stations, restaurants, theaters, etc) near you. You can see how far the places are or read reviews on them. But then you could click the Address of the place, the application "announces" it has an address, then the Google Maps might pick it up and give you turn-by-turn directions to it or allow you to see the Street View image of the place, or click the phone number and the phone application will pick it up and call them.

And as far as cost (again Tmobile is only carrier at the moment, but Android is being implemented on new devices by other carriers right now), I got a deal on the phone but I think it's $180 with 2-year contract regularly. Then I have the smallest minutes plan, 300 anytime minutes for $30/mo, and unlimited texting & data for another $35/mo (or they have a $25/mo with unlimited data only option too). So $65/mo total even cheaper per month than the iPhone would be even if I lived in a main service area!

The only things I still think the iPhone wins on is it's a more aesthetic device (but new Android devices are coming), it has multi-touch, screen is a little bit larger, and the software catalog is bigger (though again as more and more Android devices get to the market, their penetration is just going to keep growing and since it's even cheaper for developers to get registered to post & sell their apps it's almost guaranteed apps will start getting developed with Android as the standard then ported to iPhone)

Google Wave

Topic: Google Wave|Level: Beginner|Type: Informational

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

Watch for this thing!
Google's answer to "What would email be if it were invented today?"

Simple communication object called a Wave
- Email style conversations
- Instant message style conversations
- Share photos & rich media
- Interact with Blog sites / wiki like sites / any interactive content system
- Collaboratively edit documents
- Rich APIs for interactive content such as games
- Integration with other system APIs (i.e. Twitter)
- APIs to integrate to existing workflow systems

Some of the already created "Robots" in it...
- Context based Spell Check - It recommends or corrects spelling based on the context of the sentence, not purely comparing what you type to list of dictionary words (i.e. it automatically would correct "I want been soup" to "I want bean soup")
- Media Sharing - Photos dropped in the wave conversation are instantly shows to all participants and those people even see thumbnail images before the entire photo is finished uploading
- "Bloggy" automatically posts and persists the wave in a Blog and anybody interacting in the wave conversation in the blog will have their contributions instantly show up in the original participants wave client
- "Rosy" - 40 language real-time translation! You type in your language, your other participants in the wave conversation sees what you type instantly translated to their language.
- "Tweety" Puts your Twitter messages & tweets right inside a Wave and allows you to post tweats and replies from the wave & search tweats for a particular subject and get continual search updates to the list

Love ya Google - Gmail!

Topic: Gmail|Level: Beginner|Type: Informational

Google is taking over the World! ..Wide Web.

Google is a pretty amazing company, and put out some pretty amazing products. And one of the really great things about all their services is they are all seamlessly integrated to their other services where appropriate. And once you create your Google account, you can easily activate any of their Services you wish to use without creating a new account for each... One Google account does it all!

The topic of this blog is their email service, Gmail. Like most web-based email services (like Yahoo and Hotmail), Gmail is free to sign up for, accessed right from your web browser, and it's an email service. But that's about where the similarity ends. Gmail is by far the most impressive email service I've used so just go ahead and sign up for a gmail account now, you'll love it. But if ya really want some more info on it first here ya go...

Auto-Saved Drafts
As you type messages they are continually automatically saved to your Drafts group incase your webbrowser crashes or any other undesirable events.

POP3 Integration
If you have other email accounts with POP3 access available, you can set them up to have Gmail pull the messages from them as well.

Forwarding & POP/IMAP
You can also have other POP/IMAP email clients (Outlook, etc) pull messages from your Gmail account. Although I prefer to not to run those bulky applications if not necessary, that option is available.

Superior Contacts List
Gmail provides a great interface for maintaining your Contact List. You can provide multiple addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, notes, and even pictures for your contacts. And with the ever growing array of Google intergrated products and services your Google Contact List can be used in several other systems (a couple of which I'll explain shortly).

Conversations
Gmail uses a pretty smart system that based on the sender and subject of an email it keeps a string of emails grouped together as a "Conversation". You send an email to somebody and when they Reply back to it it comes back to your Inbox and shows the previous messages in the conversation more like a Chat interface than just a bunch of deeper and deeper indentations in mess of text at the bottom of the message.

Chat
Google Talk is a Instant Messaging chat service that is built right in to Gmail. You can actually Chat with other Gmail or AIM users (and I've read they're working on integrating other IM services) right from your Email window and Chat converstaions are even kept in your email as another mail message or Conversation.

Labels (not Folders)
Most other email services allow you to use Folders to sort your messages. But the problem with Folders is you 'move' your emails in to them and they exist only within that Folder. Gmail uses Labels. With Labels you can assign multiple Labels to a given message and still find your messages by clicking on the Label you want to look through and it will show you all messages with that Label assigned to it. But you also have special Labels like the "Inbox" label. A message tagged with "Inbox" of course shows in your Inbox, and simply removing that Label "Archives" the message to your "All Mail" group.

Filters
Gmail provides a very sophisticated and yet very simple interface for creating Filters. Filters allow you to do various things with your mail messages as you receive them (or at any time you manually want to run them). With Filters you can do things like automatically assign your "Friends & Family" Label to messages if they are received from your indicated senders. You can automatically Archive (skip the Inbox) messages if they come from other senders. Or even automatically delete messages from others.

** Labs **
Labs is where the real cool stuff in Gmail comes in. Labs are small applets that you can selectively choose which ones you want enabled in your email and they can do all sorts of really cool stuff. You really just have to look through the list of available Labs to see which ones look good to you but some of the ones I use are...
- "YouTube previous in mail" When you receive an email with a link to a YouTube video this puts the video right in the mail message.
- "Pictures In Chat" If you use Google Talk this uses the Picture for your Contacts right in the Chat window
- "Custom Label Colors" Gmail Lables have a handful of Color styles you can assign to your Labels, but this one lets you create your own custom Label Colors
- "Multiple Inboxes" This shows multiple panels of Inboxes in your main Inbox screen. These additional Inboxes can be custom Labels, Starred Messages, or various other configurable options
- "Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat" This one's really cool! If you have a Mobile phone number set up for a Contact you can click their name from your Chat list and select the Send SMS option. You'll then get a regular Google Talk chat window up but messages you send to that person are delivered to their cell phone as SMS messages. If they reply to you from their phone the message comes right back to your Chat window.
- "Google Calendar Gadget" If you use Google Calendar (another great Google service that will probably be a topic for a later blow) this will show your Calendar in a side panel in your mail interface.