Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Google Pages and Apps ...

Here is the second candidate for information and work hub ... I have started to gravitate towards work on this site because I find that useability of the apps to be extremely good ... the info hub that I described is the Google personalized start page ... I have 4 tabs configured with my home tab as the starting page ... in it I have my gmail, docs and spreadsheets, delicious bookmarks, a note pad, weather, horoscopes, and a world showing daylight ... all of these things make for a one stop page .. the google start page like the netvibes is extremely configurable so making a unique look as you wish is an easy task ... I also find that there is a recipe module that I have used many a time to create quick meals in a snap (good stuff) ...

I like this setup as with the MindMeister mindmapping software I can actually do quite a bit of work without leaving or booting up any programs on the pc (essential if you are to be travelling and need to work from a cafe or business center) ... the google docs and sheets really are more than functional and any work can then be stored and downloaded when you get back to your home machine (or in my case, getting my main machine back from repair). Yesterday I was going through a product development with two of my colleagues ... I used gmail to notify them and did the map outlining my ideas, I then exported to rtf file which I then took into google docs for fleshing out ... at that point, I notified them of the draft and we all then worked on the doc online ... it is a very handy and quick collaboration tool and done almost entirely web based ... when we get the document done, I will then take it into my Word 2007 for final formatting and dressing up ... by doing collaboration in this way, you will also save the clutter on your machine that always piles up when you have many cooks in the stew ...

A final thought, I have also enjoyed some of the games on google pages like two of my old favorites, pac man and bejeweled ... I find them to be a good refresh when I need a break and yet don't want to go too far or spend a whole lot of time ... quick reset for the mind ... Both of these pages give you a gateway to productivity and allow the mobile user the luxury of work on the go .... so far the experiment has helped me to hone down this configuration .... flash or pocket drive with firefox configured to go to Netvibes and Google ... great combo ... more thoughts to follow ...

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