Google Personalized home page

Browsers that I regularly use, Internet Explorer, Maxthon and Firefox, all have a default home page. And it is annoying. I undertand the need to promote themselves. And they all have option to change. I would rather have this option in a more prominent place though. Anyway, I always change IE home to a blank page. IE loads long enough to make it load a page every time.

Now I am considering changing that. The reason is Google Personalized Home Page. When you go to www.google.com you can see a page in 3 different ways. Most people, like me, see a simle and clean page with input for text and button.

If you however click on a line on the top right corner – personalized home, you can get to a different page, the one you can, well, personalize. But move to a next computer, or even another browser, and your personalization is lost.

If you have a google account, and I suggest you should, you can login. And then you see a third version, a logged-in personalized home, the one that is persistent to your google account, and will be with you wherever you log into google again.

In the world of web hype we’re living, personalizaton is claimed by every one. For most it is no more then change of background color. Google homepage is an example of what web personalization should be.

You personalize by populating a page (or several pages, since you have tabs) with Google Gadgets.
Google Gadgets are tiny web applications. Maximized IE browser shows 9-12 such gadgets, arraged in 3 columns.
Gadgest can vary in height but most are small.

Every Gardget is planned to do one thing. There are world clocks, sticky notes ,to do lists, wather, webcam viewers.
Some are written by Google. Most are written by third parties.

You can place more gadgets then fit one page, and scroll to it. Ha. Instead you can open second tab, third etc. That is what I did. I have 2 tabs. First is for info. I have my WIkipedia search gadget, world clock showing time of my remote coleagues, news from PC Mag, CNET, techbargains, techsupportalert (a very good service I should block about some time in the future). My second tab is called Office. I have a gadget showing my recently edited spreedsheets and Writely documents. I have a gmail gadget showing new email. I have google talk to quickly IM with buddies. I have AIM and Microsoft messangers too, and soon will add Yahoo.

ViViD Clip web version

I have been developing software for 20 years now. Almost all of that time I was diagramming what I do. I think visually most of the time. I better remember drawings then anything else.
It so happens that I worked with a number of packages, and was an early adopter of Visio, long before Microsoft bougth them.

There were a number of reasons that I was not satisfied with straightforward diagramming tools. One was that I had to rearrange shapes lots of times. There are others that I might some time later recount in full.

I wanted a tool that would allow me type and that would draw what I typed. I first had this idea in 1995. In 1999 I had a job that required a lot of diagramming, and web was there so I started researching it. I didn’t find what I hoped to find. In 2004 I began writing infrastructures for a 200 man year project and looked around again. Same frustrating result. This time I decided to write it for myself. It took me longer then expected, after a number of dead ends, but here it finally is.

ViViD Clip takes your text from windows clipboard and creates an image and puts it in the clipbaord again. So it copy-hotkey-paste process.

For those who want to see it first there is a web based version. It is slow, as it runs on a very slow connectin and underpowered server, but still allows one to try it first online.

Yahoo Photos vs Google Picasa

I have had some photos on Yahoo Pictures(see the links box on my blog page).
Yahoo Pictures is the application that predates Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr.
So after writing about Flickr vs Picasa, I went there to check on new features.
They advertize new version to be out soon. They provide a link to the press coverage of the newcoming version. And the review was written by Rafe Needleman , one of my most respected bloggers ever. You might want to read this review. what strikes me though that he wrote it almost a year ago.
I personally find Yahoo photos an Ok application, still not as good as Google, whose Picassa integration is the one to beat.

Yahoo Flickr vs Google Picasa

I use online applications from Google and Yahoo. Both companies have good applications. They both add more applications all the time. They both improve integrations between them. Sometimes it is easy to use both. Sometimes one has to choose one over the other.

Here is my take on Yahoo’s Flickr vs Google Picasa.

Picasa wins on price (for bulk uploads) and convenience.

Picasa does not limit uploading in terms of file size.
Flickr free version has limited size per upload per month. If you exhausted the limit, next time you’ll be able to upload after a while. I had a bunch of photos I wanted to upload in one lump, and Flickr having this limit forced me to pick.
Picasa has limited space though. May be when I reach 1G they currently have, I’ll change my mind. In the meantime, upload a whole bunch for Flickr would require a paid account. So that is why Picasa currently wins.

Both Picasa and Flickr have a desktop application that eases uploading process. The difference is that Flickr provides an upload widget that is one trick pony. Picasa is a top rate image viewer and organizer and can compete against the best of them (ACDSee is the top contender) on many features.

Why I use Google Applications

This is my first “real” blog post. I contemplated blogging for a long while. What actually triggered this was rumors that Google has a presentation web software coming.

I use lots of Google applications online and off. Let’s see. Google Mail, Writely and Spreadsheets. I have cusotmized home page full of useful gadgets. I use Maps. I use searches of all sorts, for images, and code. I use picassa now, alongside ACDSee on my computer. The reason I use picassa is its uploads to the web.

I could easily see how with very fiew missing pieces Google would become the place where I move for all the productivity applications I need.

One last bit that seals the deal is GData. It is an API to some Google applications. It means I could extend Google applications if they’re lucking a feature I need. Not all apps are covered. But the list is growing fast. Blogger is there, for example. It should not be long until all of Google is API-ed. I want Writely to be there. I am waiting for this day.