“Living In The Google World” – Day 2 and Day 3
September 25, 2008 by admin · 3 Comments
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” – End of Day 1
September 24, 2008 by admin · Leave a Comment
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.
“Living In The Google World” – Morning 1 – Working with Images
September 23, 2008 by admin · Leave a Comment
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
