Google Docs Motion
Google continue to improve upon Google docs today with the release of Google Docs motion which will “introduce a new way to collaborate – using your body”. Anything else I saw will be underwhelming compared to the article form Google, especially some of the pictures of some of the more advanced gestures it supports…
I have Google Wave
I received a Google Wave invite this morning. I’ll post more after I’ve had a play.
This also means I have invites available…
Google Wave update is live – still invite only
Filed under: Computers, Google, Programming, Technology, Web Programming
Google Wave went live yesterday but it still invite only. It seems the people with access are the people who previously had sandbox access (everyone who went to Google I/O and a few others), another 100,000 people who applied early on and select paying Google Apps users.
That number will grow slowly however as they also revealed that existing users will be able to invite others (similar to when GMail launched).
So if anyone has an invite… 
Google Chrome
Well this came way out of left field for me, but after reading their thoughts and plans on the matter makes a lot of sense: Google have released a browser, called Chrome. Main highlights: based on Webkit and using a spanking new Javascript engine called V8.
I’m using it right now to type this and everything seems in order. It feels faster than Firefox 3, the interface is nice and clean and I’m generally revelling in the nice newness of it all. Interestingly it seems to have a spellchecker built-in that doesn’t recognise the word “Google”…
Anyway, anything I might say about the browser this early will end up repeating most of their hype, and that is done much better by this comic strip they released.
PS. Currently the beta version is Windows only with Linux and Mac versions to follow..
Google Docs rule – if you use them right
Filed under: Computers, Google, Languages, Programming, Technology
I’ve been vaguely using Google Docs (specifically Spreadsheets) since it came out but never to do anything actually important. Most of the time I just had a list I need sorting, or if I was feeling sophisticated I’d use it to decide on what was best value for money (how much £/GB a range of hard drives were for instance).
Recently I started using it to plan lessons for the language learning app. The ability to use it from work (or any other computer I might be on – including viewing it on my Nokia 770) was useful, but in the end I was only really writing a list with it. Until now.
I now have a nifty little C# app that generates modules directly from a Google Spreadsheet which is definitely a Good Thing. I’ve been thinking of writing an app for module editing for a while since writing them by hand is tiresome and error prone. Google Spreadsheets does half the work for me by providing the user interface for generating a table and then provides access as simple XML.
Which brings me to the matter of actually accessing the data. Google provide a client library in C# for accessing quite a lot of their API. I tried using it but found it a little confusing. Luckily since I was just wanting to query data, I discovered that raw access was actually easier. You simply make a GET request to
http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/worksheets/key/public/values (where key is provided to you when you “publish” a spreadsheet – access to unpublished spreadsheets requires authorization which is more complicated). This gives you an Atom feed of URLs to the individual worksheets which them contain Atom feeds of either rows or columns (your choice).
The query power of LINQ (along with XElement, XAttribute etc.) make transforming the feeds into modules really easy. In fact the code that does the hard work (takes a spreadsheet key and generates the XML) is only 102 lines long, and that’s including unnecessary spacing to make the LINQ more readable (the main LINQ query is 35 lines).
Finally a rival to Google?
Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia has decided to launch a search engine. In a move reminiscent of the Open Directory Project, Wikia Search will be human edited. Beyond that, not much is known, but it will be. One of the core philosophies, according to a recent interview with Jimmy is that everything should be as transparent as possible – definitely a long way from the current search engines.
Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft working together for the good of mankind
Okay, so it’s not quite that grand. But apparently Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are going to be using the same sitemap format some time in 2007. Google Sitemaps that is.
Yahoo and MSN getting jiggy with it
It was announced a while ago, but this morning MSN Messenger announced it to me personally (well it game me a popup)… MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger users can now chat to each other using either’s client.
Read about Yahoo! on MSN
Read about MSN on Yahoo!
This is presumably a way to try and stop the multi-network clients that are becoming more popular and taking advertising revenue from the two of them. Well sort of. It’s more likely an attempt to stop Google’s attempt to spread a free and open IM network.
Google Video Ads
The very eagle eyed amongst you may notice I’ve altered the layout of the site slightly. One of the most prominent changes is switching to a smaller ad size for old posts (before I had a large rectangular ad above any post that is more than seven days old figuring that anyone visiting old content on a blog really wanted to be there and would get over it). The new 200×200 size immediately started showing video ads on a few pages.
For an example, visit my post about the cartoons of the prophet Mohamed.