“Living In The Google World” Noon Day 4 – Crash and burn

(here’s a short update half way through Day 4 of “Living In The Google World”.)

Oh boy…I crashed and burned on using the Google presentation tool. 

I tried, really, even accepting that I would have a simple plain b&w presentation which will emphasize the content over the presentation aesthetics.

I gave up when the bullet points on my bullet point list drew inside of the first character of the line. The same thing happened when I tried to create a numbered list. No dice. 

So I happily googled “best online presentation tool” and found SlideRocket, currently in beta.

It looked slick, had an Adobe Air desktop “offline interface” and had some nice cool looking transitions and a cool looking blue slide background. 

After exporting my Google presentation to PPT and then importing to SlideRocket, I just started working. Trying to make up for the time I lost futzing with the Google presentation app, finding SlideRocket, installing the offline interface, etc. 

After about 10 minutes of seeing that simple things like change the color of the background on a selected list of slides was more complicated than simply selecting the slides I want changed and then applying a new color, I gave up. 

Don’t get me wrong, SlideRocket looks like a great tool and I’m hoping they continue their lead in the online presentation space because it will rock when all the bits and pieces are worked out. 

After deciding I was spending too much time trying to figure out how to get my online apps to work at putting text on a page and things like that, I had to punt and go back to trusty Powerpoint. 

Strike 1 for “Living In The Google World”.

Chrome’s Critical Role In Google’s Vision of the Future

Do you want to know what Google is thinking about the future, the future of Chrome and the apps you run on it?

They talk about it all the time. It’s just a matter of putting all the pieces together. 

The very smart Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, shares his thoughts in a post to the official Google blog.

A summary of his thoughts on the future:

• In the next decade 70% of human race will have mobile or fixed Internet access at gigabyte speeds. 
   
• Our devices will automatically reach out and connect to other local devices, offering benefits and services which will seem almost like magic (my words not his).  He uses the example of asking your device (think your handy dandy gPhone) where your reading glasses are and having it reply with the last location where the RFID tag was seen. 
   
• Streaming content will become as interactive as static web pages are today. 
   
• Devices in our homes will connect with consumable products (your refrigerator knows the food in it, your washing machine knows the detergent on the shelf) and we’ll be able to measure and control aspects of our lives most important to use (power consumption for example). 
   

Of all of Vint’s observations, one stands out as a beacon of clarity for Google’s vision for the future.

He comments that we’ve learned that “the Internet is essentially a software artifact” and that “if it can be imagined, it can be programmed“. 

Imagine with me for a moment this future he’s outlined. 

Smart devices everywhere. Small compact smart devices. Appliances which have interfaces to display their content, their status, and allow us to interact with them in a smarter more complex way than we can imagine today. 

The software powering everything will have to be a small, tight, well written and fast performing.

This software has to be less about the features of “itself” and more about exposing the features of the machines, and devices using it. 

This software would need to effectively act like a “window into the functionality of the device”, and in the process, make sure that it doesn’t get in the way of your interaction with the device itself. 

If any of this is sounding familiar, here are a few quotes about Chrome from Sundar Pichai, Google’s Vice President of Product Management:

• “We think of the browser as the window to the web”.
   
• “it’s a tool for users to interact with the web sites and applications they care about, and it’s important that we don’t get in the way of that experience.”
   
• “we’re going to make you a great tool that’s very important to the things you do, but at the same time, we’re doing everything we can to be an invisible part of that process.”
   

“Living In The Google World” – Day 2 and Day 3

How has it been “Living In The Google World”, only using Chrome and online apps?

Ok, I have a confession to make. Actually a few of them. 

The last 2 days have been relatively light in terms of producing work online. There was a good amount of offline things I’ve had to do (if you filed for an extension on your taxes in April, you know they’re due now).

I also started using my hard drive for storage. More on this below.  

In any case, I have done some work and have a few new insights. 

1.  I’m crawling along still without Robofrom, but things are getting easier on the password front because Chrome is remembering all of them. Unfortunately my upgrade to the Chromium nightly build means I’ve had to re-enter the passwords I had already stored in Chrome. 
 

2. I ditched the online storage issue. I’m sure there’s an answer out there somewhere waiting to be found and I’ll find it sooner or later, but right now, I store images on my hard drive and then upload them to Amazon’s servers. Doing this made my life MUCH easier. I can still edit in Photoshop.com but not having to save the image over to Picasa Web Album removed a few steps and reduced frustration. 
 

3. Chrome is a little finicky with the refresh on some sites, Awstats (stats program that shows information about your website and it’s visitors) is one of them.

When I hit the site’s “update” link, the screen flashes like it’s doing an update, but then I have to do a “refresh page” with Chrome to get the page to redraw.
 

4. When I select a bit of text to copy, I sometimes stumble into the situation where the whole page is selected by Chrome. This means I have to unselect, go back and more carefully select the text I want.

I think this happens more often when I’m selecting text in a text box, but I’ll keep watching and see if I can figure it out. 

So there ya go.

Not much drama, but then again, I wasn’t doing much hard core work online today. Tomorrow will be a much different story as I have a couple of deadlines to hit. 

I haven’t bit the bullet yet to convert all my email accounts to flow through Gmail, but I always know it’s there for me. 

If someone knows of a simple and transparent “online hard drive“, please post a comment.

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