1FPS|by David Chartier

Google finally released an official Google Calendar Sync add-on for Outlook on Windows. I don’t use Windows so I haven’t given this a shot yet, and I’m not familiar with any Windows alternatives out there. Still, it’s nice to see the company finally releasing official tools that bridge the wide gap between the convenience of web apps and the integrated power of the desktop.

ReadWriteWeb quotes Karim, one of its own commenters, who was responding to a pro-Google Docs piece on the site a few days ago. Setting aside the fact that the public barely knows about online office suites in general, there are just too damn many great quotes in here about the significant functionality problems that plague Web 2.0 apps, such as:

Open a Google doc. Paste an image. Oh, that’s right, you can’t Ctrl-C copy, Ctrl-V PASTE an image into a document. Ok, so INSERT an image. Now proportionally resize the image so it retains its aspect ratio. Oh, that’s right, you can’t. Now crop the image. Oh that’s right, you can’t.

and

Now type some text and select it. Choose one of the fonts on your computer instead of the six fonts Google licensed from Microsoft. Oh wait, you can’t. Create a new paragraph style. Oh wait, you can’t. Change the font color and background on some text. Now copy that formatting to another paragraph. Oh wait, you can’t.

and

People just love to use software where some incredibly basic feature like “search & replace” is marked with “WARNING! EXPERIMENTAL! Use eye protection! This could blow up in your face!”

and

Finally you tell us that “Google will win this battle” is because “they have the economic engine,” meaning, they have advertising in all their stuff. Yay capitalism. I know the last six times I used a word processor, I kept thinking it needed more advertising.

I know I quoted about half the entire comment, but head over and read the rest; it’s all good stuff. Karim’s right: Google Docs and similar offerings can certainly do the trick for people who need some of the absolute basic office features. But they consistently fall short when you get to the rest of the basic features, never mind anything even marginally more powerful that most of the real world uses.

Considering all this, and being the fan of desktop software’s power and integration, I see a lot more potential in services like Microsoft’s new private beta Office Live Workspace which I wrote about for Ars back in December. It’s more of an online conduit for sharing files and offline collaboration; there’s no web-based editing right now, though limited features are on their way. Never mind the fact that Office is one of Microsoft’s largest revenue generating products‚ÄîOffice Live Workspace provides an easy way for home and small business users to share and collaborate on documents, yet still harness the vast power of the desktop Office suite.

Sure, some day we’ll all have flying cars, ubiquitous, terabyte Internet connections, and web apps with all sorts of super powers. Until then, and web apps for making lists of things to get done notwithstanding, desktop software is where the real power for getting things done lies.

Google Reveals 2008 Plans For Google Apps | TechCrunch

Well hot diggity damn:

We should also expect Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar to soon work offline via Google Gears

This will be great news to Google app users who also roll with Firefox and Google Gears, but I’m a little disappointed that Google isn’t using the opportunity (or perhaps can’t) to push this functionality with the new HTML5 standards like client-side database storage that WebKit and (by extension) Safari supports. Sure, Google offers a developer section for building Google Gears for WebKit, but that’s a long way from being a “click here to install” operation for the end user.

Of course, I honestly don’t know that much about HTML5 and whether it holds a candle to what Google has done with its Firefox-proprietary Gears extension, so I’m not necessarily disappointed solely with Google that offline access isn’t coming for every browser (and no, you do not have to adjust your display: I did just use “Firefox” and “proprietary” in a sentence without including “Internet Explorer”). I just prefer Safari for its better Mac OS X integration and speed, but the prospect of taking these other apps offline is admittedly damn appealing.

From Google’s AdSense blog with An effective pairing of AdSense and e-commerce:

the site’s owners decided to use Google AdWords to drive qualified traffic to their site

I love how advertisers are changing the language in this age of increasingly targeted marketing to more or less now read: ‘publishers attract more readers because they use our advertising tools.’ When in the history of modern media has any marketing agency been able to claim that readers are flocking to a publication because of the advertising?

I know Google’s all about thinking outside the box, but this is ridiculous. I’m also sure I’m pretty late to the party on this one, but it’s fun anyway: Apparently, if you get directions from New York to London via Google Maps, you might really want to take their advice when double-checking said directions before you take off. Step #24 is a doozie.

[via Circle Six Design blog]

I used the Google Updater’s own ‘Uninstall’ button to remove the recently-released Google Desktop for Mac 1.0 that Scott had a scoop on. I even had to restart afterwards for an unrelated reason. After checking my Applications folder to confirm that both Google Desktop.app and Google Updater.app were both gone, you can imagine my surprise to see Google Updater Helper still live and kicking in my processes. It isn’t listed in my Login Items, and Spotlight can’t see to find it anywhere on my hard drive either.

Unless this is a process that Google Notifier runs itself (which I doubt, because I’ve never seen this process until after installing Google Desktop), this is a problem that Google needs to fix.

Inside AdSense: Wysi-what?

Although this can be a significant advantage when you’re editing your page, the same features that make WYSIWYG editors so great can actually make it harder to implement AdSense. If you paste the code into a “design” or “layout” view in one of these programs, then what you see (the ad code itself) is what you get on your page.

Does Google seriously receive enough “help me make it go!” customer support emails to warrant a post like this?  I’m honestly not trying to play the “I’m a 1337 HTML ninja” game - I’ll be the first to admit my skills are ‘mostly harmless’ at best - but still. The AdSense system offers quite a bit of help files and hand-holding when setting up ad blocks, I’m just surprised a blog post was warranted to help move things along.

Now this is one heckuva screensaver. I was watching the Scobleizer interview Nick Baum, product manager of Google Reader, and Jason Shellen, new business development manager at Google. Scoble quickly pans to this LCD which is displaying a real-time virtualization tool that charts Google searches across the globe. Colors represent languages. Scoble then made a crack that more light was coming from Redmond than from the entire country of Africa. Setting aside the real world unfortunate-ness of that statement, that’s awesome.

I’ve been thinking about how important of an impact RSS has had on the internet and the way we aggregate information, and I realized: we need a newsreader that can properly store, index and permanently archive the news they collect, much like email applications have done for their medium more or less since their inception. I’m a happy user of NetNewsWire, but if I set it to retain the articles from my 300 feeds for more than 30 days, it begins to chug when doing anything intensive like searching, or even simply starting up.

We need a piece of software that literally brings the email paradigm to RSS and newsfeeds, allowing users to store and usably interact with a growing archive of what is more or less a deliberate, customized perspective on how we perceive the world and our journey of learning more about it. Google News recently announced the ability to search through 200 years worth of news from a few publications, and that’s a huge step in a great direction, but it doesn’t allow users to keep a record of their specific interests in the world in the same way email allows us to store (nearly) all of our electronic correspondence.

So are any developers listening? Feedburner says my blog hasn’t quite hit the big time yet, but a nerd can hope, can’t he?

Writely Help Center - Will I have to register with Google to use the site? (Coming Soon)

Well shiver me timbers - I just received an email from Writely confirming exactly what I was talking about in Google Account ≠ Writely. They’re working on migrating users to a Google Account sign-in, and they’re emailing the users to let them know when they’re next on the list. Hooray.