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”.

Post from: The Chrome Voice "The Chrome Voice" is your source for news and information about the Google Chrome browser.

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

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.

Post from: The Chrome Voice "The Chrome Voice" is your source for news and information about the Google Chrome browser.

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

Well…it’s the end of day 1 of “Living in the Google World” and it’s been a bit of a rough day.

Here’s the summary:

1. I WANT MY ROBOFORM! 

Without key extensions, some of the fast navigation I do from site to site was slowed considerably as I had to dig my passwords out of RoboForm to manually enter them into each site. 

Yes, I had to cheat a bit and use my RoboForm desktop app to access my password. 

Tomorrow I will use Roboform2Go that I have installed on a memory key. 
 

2. Is it Chrome or the Site that’s not working?

When I get to a site and find something not working, I immediately wonder whether Chrome is having a problem or the site is having a problem. With Firefox, my first thought is that the site has a problem.
 

3. Google “Presentation” app…am I missing something?

I need to work on a PPTx presentation. I figured I would open up the presentation briefly in Powerpoint to export it as a PPT and then upload it to Google. No dice. Some how the presentation got corrupted(?) and Powerpoint can’t open it. So I get to rebuild it from scratch using the Google Presentation tool. 

Ok. Upload my photos to Picasa Web Album and try to use them in the Google Presentation tool. I ran into the same error I ran into when trying to access a photo on The Chrome Voice this morning. The URL from Picasa Web Album isn’t recognized. 

Bleh. Searching the web to find out what to do. Fortunately for me the users in the Picasa forum figured it out…although it involves some editing of the link string (not for normal every day users), I can handle it. 

Next I’m distracted by the lack of obvious features in the Google Presentation app. I guess MS Powerpoint’s got me trained to add arrows and other visual guides. I may have missed them in the Google presentation app, but I had to settle for a functional presentation slides for now. Maybe I’ll learn more over the next 7 days, but I’m not really comfortable with the quality of what I have now. 

I did take a quick spin to see whether Zoho.com’s presentation app would do better. Unfortunately, I received the following message: ”chrome is not supported for editing”.

Oopsie…
 

Other work I did:

I did flit in and out of using a Google spreadsheet reasonably easy. 

Checking email was a bit of a hassle since I have all my accounts flowing into Thunderbird, but I worked around it by hitting each account from the web manually. I know I can consolidate all my email into Gmail, but I’ll save that for later. 
 

Summary of Day 1 of “Living In The Google World”

1. There’s a learning curve and it took much longer to do things I take for granted using my normal combo of desktop and online apps. 

2. The temptation to “revert back” and give up the 7 days of “Living In The Google World” was there, but I figure I just need to get through the acclimation process and things will get better. 

3. The thing I missed the most through out the day? All the little extensions and indicators I have plugged in to Firefox and have come to count on as part of my online experience. Things like Roboform, Compete.com’s tool bar and even the Google Toolbar for easy familiar access to all the book marks I’ve created across various computers. 

4. I also missed ability to know exactly where I could keep all my working files. If I give in on anything, the first will probably be to start making use of my computer’s hard drive. We’ll see. 
 

Bugs I found? 

1. In the process of going “back” to a previous page, I got the little tool tip saying “Click to go back, hold to see history” stuck in the middle of my browser window. It just hovers there, over everything, unclickable and only goes away when I minimize and then maximize the window. It’s not easily recreateable and not a big deal. 

Seriously…about RoboForm…

I am a true fan of RoboForm and have it installed on the 4 computers I use the most. Download a free trial version of RoboForm here.

Also, I use RoboForm2Go when I travel. It installs on a memory key and easily syncs with my desktop version of RoboForm. Download a free trial version of RoboForm2Go here.

Post from: The Chrome Voice "The Chrome Voice" is your source for news and information about the Google Chrome browser.

“Living In The Google World” – End of Day 1

In his blog, Garett gives the suggest to Microsoft to partner with Google on their search results while secretly building their own new search engine.

That doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t address the real issue…Microsoft’s mindset.

Having lived most of their corporate lives with the growth of desktop computing, that’s the world they live in. Add to it that the company makes most of it’s revenues from OS’s and desktop apps and you can see how easily they can be stuck in the older “desktop world”.

I see one simple answer on how they can fix this:

Microsoft needs to form a division that lives, breathes, eats and sleeps only on the web.

This group needs to eschew any sort of desktop app, use only web apps and mobile devices. 

Doing so will clearly put them into the experience of what today’s advanced users and tomorrows regular users need and want. I think it will also put them into the experience that their competition (Google) is living every day.

It’s going to be annoying to them for a while, but they can start by using Chrome and the Google App suite in order to learn it inside and out. This will help knock them even further out of their “Microsoft dominate the world with desktop software 1990’s” mindset. 

The knowledge and experience Microsoft gains from this division will make it easy for then to know what to build. From there, they can put their muscle and $ behind building it.

As I mentioned, the nature of their company right now is that their revenues come from the OS and from their apps.

That’s the revenue that makes their company work, so they are compelled to “adapt” that software to work with the new paradigm with mediocre results. 

Better to start with a new “class” of thinking and get back into the game before their boat anchor OS’s and desktop apps pull them down any further.

There’s the answer. Easy to say, harder to do. Still, I bet Microsoft could easily do it if they just get out of their own way.

You can read all of Garett’s story here.

Post from: The Chrome Voice "The Chrome Voice" is your source for news and information about the Google Chrome browser.

“Living In The Google World” – The real answer for Microsoft

This is the first day of “Living In The Google World” and I decided my first adventure would be to figure out how to edit and add images to “The Chrome Voice”.

So here goes:

Step 1 – Reinstall Chrome:

I want to start from a clean slate so I uninstall Chrome, reinstall, switch to the developer channel and update to version 0.2.152.1. 

All went well, and now I’m 100% Chrome and “Living In The Google World”.  

I do wonder why the about box for this version shows “Checking for new version”  constantly.
 

Step 2  - Find Photo editing tool

I start looking at Picasa online, but want more control over image editing so I go to Photoshop.com (Adobe’s online image editing).

The interface is fairly intuitive and the app runs lightning quick in Chrome.

One problem…I need to get an image to edit…and I’m not ready to run back to using my hard drive yet so I open up my online Picasa library directly from Photoshop.com. Very cool. 

(NOTE: 1st “Living in the Google World” Insight – I need my online apps to be able to fully access files to my online storage location in a secure fashion. This seems like a basic function that every online app should have.)

I pick a test file, make a quick edit and send it back to my Picasa online folder. So good so far. 
 

Step 3 – Make the photo accessible to this blog

Now I have to get this file to display on my blog. Easy. Picasa gives me a URL I can use to share. 

Well not quite…

For some reason, Word Press doesn’t like the URL when I try to use it to access the image.

I’m looking all over for the easy and obvious way to share, even hit the help file and see about emailing the link to myself. That still doesn’t work.

After about 10 minutes of trying, I give up and embed the image using HTML (see the image above).

So the net results of “Living in the Google World” so far? It’s taken me 60 minutes instead of 10 to create this post.

Ok, some of it was a learning curve and installation of software which was expected.

The part I didn’t expect and I would guess most typical users don’t have the patience for was messing around trying to figure out how to display a photo on my Picasa web album here.

Either there’s something I’m not getting about Picasa’s way of doing things or I just hit a friction spot that needs to be ironed out.

Summary:
Key learning: online file editing tools need to easily access online file hosting services
App for photo editing – www.photoshop.com
App for photo hosting – picasaweb.google.com
Browser: Google Chrome
Desktop Apps used: NONE
Desktop Storage used: NONE

Post from: The Chrome Voice "The Chrome Voice" is your source for news and information about the Google Chrome browser.

“Living In The Google World” – Morning 1 – Working with Images