There is an Android (a.k.a. Possible iPhone Killer) Coming

To begin with I used to be a cell phone hater, I thought it was just another bill, and a total waste of money. Two months ago I purchased a Motorola Krzr, and it has changed my life so much that I cut most of my features on the home phone. I was thinking about getting a smartphone, but at the time the new iPhone 3G was coming out and it was only offered by Rogers in Canada, I wanted to wait for a while until some competition dropped the prices and other competitive smartphones came out (Apple products are too expensive!!!!). Now it looks like the first Android phone should be released from T-Mobile this fall, hopefully before the holiday spending spree, and will be on a HTC phone (Check out the YouTube video below). There will be an Apps store, hopefully with many being available and useful; Android will need it if it wants to compete with the iPhone. Originally there was supposed to be many Android based phones, but they were all delayed until 2009. What this means is that the world of smartphones will evolve rapidly over the next 6-12 months, damn its hard to keep up with technology hey?

No Gmail!!!

Yesterday/today (depending on where you live) Gmail went down for some, probably most users. Those who were affected tried to log in but were given the deadly message of "Temporary Error (502)", whatever that means. Apparently it lasted for two hours, I never it experienced because I was in bed dreaming about football, my girlfriend, water chemistry, cycling, and sunshine. The cause of the outage was a temporary glitch in Google's contacts system which caused Gmail not to load properly. Google, like the good people they are, apologized via a blog post. I guess Google technology, like all technology, is not perfect, there will be outages, bugs, delays, and crashes. Some people are jumping on the bandwagon and claiming that instances like this display that cloud computing will never work and we should stick with traditional desktop software..blah blah blah blah blah. My response to this is, how much time is wasted by this traditional software freezing/crashing/bugging out? The answer is a lot. The real issue that the Gmail outage raises is Google's poor technical support, which is basically a user group. Google definitely needs to put some of its big money in this area, they're good for it.

Google Roundup for August 3rd - August 10th

Things picked up from last week with a ton of news/updates. Lets begin:

• This is one of many Google Earth updates. There is a new layer for the Olympic Games, just go under Geographic Web>Places>Summer Games 2008. It is really cool, it will give you such things as today's events and fly you to the event location.
• Some of the icons in Google Earth have changed, check out this post for details.
• Finally road maps for China have been added to Google Maps, definitely done in time for the Olympics. I recently bought a Motorola KRZR cell phone, accessing Google Maps mobile definitely makes life much easier.
• Check out the pic below of Michael Weiss-Malik who proposed during a street view shot outside of the Googleplex in Mountain View. Also take notice of the long lines.

View Larger Map

• New street view imagery is available for Google Earth and Maps. Countries added to the list are Australia and Japan, hopefully street view will hit Canada soon.
• Check out the Google Earth Plug-in Driving Simulator. Note that this is only available for Windows users.
• If your an Olympics fan (I find it OK), take a quick look at the Summer Games section provided by Google News. To see more Olympic related products from Google, check out this blog.
• For people in the US, Walgreens has been added as a print provided. I didn't know the order prints feature existed for Canadian users, but we only have one provider :(
• In an earlier blog that I posted, I gave Google Sites an excellent review. Every user can now use Sites on their own domain, and use their own URL.
• To keep track of the Olympic games, check out the 2008 Summer Games Gadget for Google Desktop. For cellphone users, go to www.google.com/m/summergames.
• Google Docs recently won an award in the Breakthrough Product Category for Windows IT Pro Magazine, I definitely agree with that one.

Olympic Gadget for Google Desktop

This was definitely a busy week on the Google front. Hopefully it will be another exciting week in the world of Google.

Google Sites is Amazing

As mentioned in last weeks blog, Google Page Creator (GPC) will not be allowing any new users and those that have accounts will have to switch to Google Sites by the end of this year. I kind of sensed the end for GPC, there zero news/updates being made by Google. Last week I switched to Google Sites (I refer to it as Sites), and I find it amazing, it can do so much more than what Google Page Creator could. Before you read the following details, check out my site created with Sites and the pic below to get a sense of what it can offer.

Web Site Creation with Google Sites

As the name implies, websites (Google defines this as a collection of web pages) can be made with Sites. The number of websites created is limited by the storage, 100 MB for the free version, 10 GB for those that pay for Google Apps (only $50/year, other services included). Similar to GPC, there are templates, but the selection seems to be better with Sites and editing of the page components (i.e., Header text colour) is easily done, very close to how Blogger does it. Unlike GPC, the sidebar and body width can be easily changed, it was a big pain and task to do this in GPC. Sites handles images very well, which was a major criticism of GPC, and text is easily wrapped around it. As you notice from the pic above, the actual editing of webpage content is very similar to Google Documents (which I now use for my blogging), much better than the editor in GPC. Gadgets can be added, there are quite a lot available but I've encountered problems with text wrapping around these. The biggest improvement over GPC is the ability to add gadgets that can handle uploaded files, announcements, lists, and text (text box). I am currently using files and announcements, these are created as separate pages, and the gadget just condenses these to a small box. For example, if you look at the page that will be used for one of my teaching courses, a files section will be found. This is actually a web page that is condensed to be seen in a nice, easily viewable box.
Sites is a excellent product, and a great advance over GPC. Once again Google has created another hit product.

Google Docs: Keep the Updates Coming!!

Two updates were just released for Google Docs. The first is for probably the weakest offering of the Google Docs package, Presentations. One of the key offerings that this was missing was animations. I use these in my presentations, nothing too flashy, but for some points you want it to just appear on demand. Now it is possible to do this, in Google terms it is called sequential reveal. When an object is clicked on, a box will appear around it, right click and Incremental Reveal can be selected. There are no flashy animations, just appear, but it gets the job done. Another excellent feature introduced is full screen mode in documents. This can be accessed through the view menu or by hitting Ctrl+Shift+F, awesome. I think it is excellent how this free software is constantly updated, Microsoft and Corel should give this a try. With Microsoft the wait is ~3 years with significant illogical changes, for Corel the wait is 1 year with very few changes, if any. Free is the way to go these days.

Google Roundup For July 28th - August 2nd
This week has been sort of quiet on the Google front, with only a few updates and new features on Google Products, here it goes:

• Check out this super overlay composite of aeronautical charts in the US .The guy who created this is Matt Snow, check out his web site called Google Earth Library
  for more great stuff.

• Again more Google Earth news, and this involves the upcoming Beijing Olympics. The satellite imagery has been updated showing the venues for the upcoming Olympics and some of the buildings are done in 3D. Hopefully the air quality will improve, it is going to be brutal for the athletes trying to compete in the pollutant rich air. Also, like the majority of people, I am outraged that the media covering the Beijing Olympics are subjected to censorship via blocking of certain Internet sites (i.e., Google Searching democracy). This is the year 2008, I had thought that those days were behind us.
  

Beijing Olympic Buildings in Google Earth

• For the Google Sites users (I still haven't tried this product), you can now change the width of the whole site (previously 100%), text boxes, sidebar and header or these can be turned off completely. Another well needed improvement that has been added is being able to preview the site in a viewer.

• I just visited the Google Page Creator site and they are not allowing any new signups. They want people to start using Google Sites, and those with existing Google Page Creator web pages will have to switch to Google Sites later this year, hopefully this will be somewhat automated.

• Google Apps is becoming very popular, there are currently more than one million users worldwide in the education field. Some big schools using this include the University of San Diego and Notre Dame. I am using it for most of my new documents, with the exception of those that contain private student information (its a rule at my university). I just love the beauty of being able to access the docs anywhere.
  

• The YouTube Screening Room has over 5 million views since it was launched over a month ago, amazing. New features added to this include an easier way to leave film comments and an easier way to get reminders of new films released every two weeks.

That is all for this week, come back again next week for more Google News.

Google Search is Cool and not Cuil

Like most people, when I want to search something, I use Google. I've tried other search engines and they don't have the same appeal, either their interface is unattractive or the search results are just poor. A couple days ago, Cuil (pronounced cool) came along, a new search engine created by two former Google employees. Claims were made that they have 3x as many webpages indexed as Google and they protect a persons private information (i.e., no weblogs), some were seeing this as a definite Google killer. I tried it out, and my experience was not cool. For the first three hours I couldn't type anything into the search box, apparently they had a server failure, results are given in columns so its hard to tell which hit is the most relevant, and I couldn't figure out how to do an image search. Two aspects that I did like was the Explore by Category Box and the tabbed bar at the top which gives relevant searches, click on this link to see the result of typing Google in the Cuil search engine. I think that Google Search offers so much more, such as specifically searching books, journal articles, news, images, blogs, maps..etc, basically more options are available for the searcher. Also, people turn to Google for so much more than search, I use Docs for Office-like applications but online, Google Earth to explore the world, Gmail for email, Calendar to organize my life, and the lists goes on.

Cuil is not Cool or Kool

In response (I think so anyways) today Google announced some new search features (will start appearing in the next few days) to allow searchers how their results are customized and these will appear as messages in the upper right corner of the search results page. When "more details" is clicked on, information on location (based on computer's IP address and can be specified by the user), recent searches (kept for a limited time and deleted when browser is closed), and web history (which can be signed out of). As Google admitted when Cuil was released, competition is good for business. This new ability to view some of those search secrets is a huge step forward for the internet searcher.