Google’s product development is brilliant at using its other products to build new ones. The Apps team has just put the optical character recognition from Google’s book scanning project into Google Docs. Upload the scan of a page and have it turned into editable text.
Add that to Google Voice (now launched in the US) and bye bye eFax’s business model.
Add a few tweaks and Google can take on the document management industry.
You’ve upgraded your iPhone to iOS4. What does it do? Ars Technica has a comprehensive round-up of the new features in iOS4 and how to use them.
WARNING: iOS4 can break the mail, contacts and calendar sync with Google Apps. Google sync is now working.
Just on the phone helping a new iPad owner get started, who’d never used a touchscreen… he couldn’t get the ‘slide to unlock’ message on the screen to work, turned out he was trying to move a button on the casing… a yelp of surprised delight when we got his finger to swipe on the screen. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.“
Here’s a great mashup - Live map of London Underground trains. Created with Transport for London’s recently released data feed, it shows why the government must free its data as quickly as possible – TfL have presumably had this information for years and sat on it; one programmer put this together in a few hours.
Microsoft went live with Windows Live Skydrive, the competitor to Google Docs which lets you edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint presentations. Too little, too late – a familiar comment on MS’s efforts these days. Here’s a quick look at the Word web app.
The promise is that we’ll be able to seamlessly move between viewing and editing docs with the high-powered and well-known MS Word and with a lower-powered browser version. The web app is pretty, and has a usefully familiar interface, but it is a long way behind Google.
Some of the shortcomings will be fixed, but some are non-trivial and others are showstoppers for many businesses:
Amusingly, somewhere in the version history, my Google Docs account grabbed control and threw an error saying it couldn’t show the doc. Play nice, boys!
The FT reports that Google is moving all staff off Windows and onto Macs and Linux machines, to improve security after its Chinese operations were hacked recently.
As the FT points out
Windows is known for being more vulnerable to attacks by hackers and more susceptible to computer viruses than other operating systems. The greater number of attacks on Windows has much to do with its prevalence, which has made it a bigger target for attackers.
But, if you think switching to a Mac is an easy way to improve your security, remember that the kind of attack Google suffered is some way down a hacker’s list. First make sure an outsider can’t fake a password-reset telephone call, or simply guess one of your employees’ passwords…
You’re in the old world, you’ve got your new iPad and after the first rush of excitement you might be feeling a little deflated, especially if you’re an iPhone user. A bigger screen, yes, but… um… web sites and apps… all rather familiar… where’s the rush of the new?
The answer may well be quite subtle: the iPad is revolutionising our stale old 1960s computer-user interface. With a touch screen, you interact directly with the content under your fingers. For instance, WIRED magazine lets you scroll horizontally across articles’ opening pages and then down into their further pages; the FT lets you touch companies’ names for a profile and then pinch-zoom their stock charts; and many apps switch between a functional interface in landscape mode and a pure reading pane in portrait.
Here are some early apps that make the most of this new world:
And some other iPad essentials:
Apple has released a beta of its new MobileMe web email service. It’s slick and elegant in an Apple way, and should be great for personal use.
You get some decent semi-pro features too
For business or heavy use it doesn’t compare to Google’s Gmail, which has better features for heavy emailers and allows you to manage a domain and administer multiple users, but aesthetes will appreciate Apple’s polished interface.
Just had a first go with Docs.com, Microsoft’s document sharing extension to Facebook. It failed at the first hurdle: I opened a new Word doc, added some text and clicked ‘finish editing’ – result, blank document. You need to click the ‘save’ icon before ‘finishing editing’. Doesn’t look like this one went through a usability lab. And web-based apps should drop the old ‘save’ paradigm, it’s unnecessary and the source of eons of lost work.
This is the first public outing for MS’s web versions of its dominant Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc). The idea of launching through Facebook is clever – a huge viral sharing network – but MS needs to look at Google Apps and understand why it works so well: it’s effortless, intuitive and almost invisible in ease of use.
MS might have more features, but losing your edits is a feature i’ll skip.
PS when I try to edit the doc again, it wrongly says it’s being edited by someone else.
Tim Anderson reckons the new web-based versions of the Microsoft Office apps – Word, Excel and PowerPoint – are too crippled to be really useful for now.
‘Office Web Apps’ launches on May 12, alongside the new Office 2010 desktop software suite. As a business, you’ll need a SharePoint 2010 server to use them or an equivalent hosted service (we’re expecting more info on the latter in the next few days) – a bit of a shame as SharePoint needs a lot of investment to be any use, more than a small business can afford. Consumers will get the web apps through Windows Live or Facebook Docs.
The web apps are extensions of your desktop files – you can’t feasibly abandon the desktop apps yet. They offer viewing and limited editing, but the limitations are likely to confuse and frustrate users.
For now, we’re huge fans of Google Apps – a rapidly maturing service that is complete, consistent and highly useful in its pure online form.
