“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.

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

Day 1 Morning:

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