Publish your metrics as a colourful chart in Google Spreadsheets or upgrade to Thunderbird 2.
Curiously, after reading about the Picasa
upgrade, a related article about photo management software popped up in Google
Reader, courtesy of Robert
Scoble's excellent
link blog.
Robert Scoble had published a couple of podcasts featuring a product
demo and an
interview with Gibu Thomas, CEO of
Sharpcast. Sharpcast is yet another photo management software tool and appears to offer a number of advantages over
Picasa:
- Unlimited free storage
- Automatic synchronisation between PC and Web albums
- Original images are preserved
The unlimited storage seems too good to be true and is very useful because, at some point in the near future, I am likely to exceed Picasa's storage limit unless Google follow suit.
Secondly, if I ever edit an image or perform any housekeeping, I will have to manually replicate those changes to Picasa Web Albums. As I am very
lazy, that is unlikely to happen.
Finally, I have always presumed that Flickr and Picasa are compressing the images to degrade the quality of my professional photographs to save space and bandwidth. However, that is fine as you get what you pay for and I am paying nothing. Obviously, it is preferable to have the original, unmodified image available without having to continually burn another CD/DVD.
So I signed up for Sharpcast, downloaded the desktop software and quickly synchronised the 'My Pictures' folder to the server.
Sharpcast was very fast and easy to use. I was able to synchronise and upload 1,062 photos with a single click. This took less time than uploading the same content from Picasa. Although you can upload multiple albums in Picasa, one album is uploaded at at time and the remainder are queued.
Sharpcast is a genuine competitor to Flickr and Picasa and in the podcast, Gibu talks about extending the range of files to include documents. Sharpcast also includes support for Mac users and mobile phones.
My only reservation is that Sharpcast really does seem too good to be true. I am also a little hazy about the business model. It is not clear if this is Web 2.0 beta software which will subsequently charge or whether Sharpcast will attempt to make money from additional services. Currently the only paid service is photo printing.
Google have
increased the amount of free storage to 1GB (previously 250MB) available at
Picasa Web Albums.
This means I can now backup all of my photos comfortably (854MB) in one place.
If you have lots of photos of your cat, $500
upgrades the capacity to 250GB.
Like most people, I store information in many different places. Lots of data is stored directly on my work laptop while yet more data is stored on my computer at home.
- Mail folders
- Address book
- Text files
- Corporate blogs
- Presentations
- Word documents
- Intranet resources
- Whitepapers
- Web history
- RSS feeds
- Photos
- Music
Even more data is stored on external servers
- Gmail
- Blinklist
- Web site, blogs and mySQL databases at Bluehost
- Post-it on fridge
- Mobile phone
- Palm PDA
- My head (last resort)
I first used
Google Desktop a couple of years ago when it was first launched. Back then, the ongoing indexing process seemed to add a unreasonable load on my laptop, so I decided to uninstall the program and revert to old-fashioned searching in Windows Explorer and Outlook (and now Thunderbird).
However, recently I decided to give Google Desktop another go because I am a Google
whore. The initial index of the entire computer took a few hours to index a grand total of 131,854 items (44,118 emails, 5,059 Web history and 82,677 files).
After the initial index was complete, the overhead of the ongoing index process barely seemed noticeable (although my laptop has also been upgraded to a higher specification in the interim).
Google Desktop scans email folders, text files, PDF, Powerpoint, Word documents, Gmail and Web history. As you might expect, the search is lightning fast, much faster than searching within Thunderbird although the range of options isn't as comprehensive.
I find myself using Google Desktop a lot. Often I am not looking for a specific email, article or document but researching a topic, trying to locate all possible relevant information from the different sources available. Google Desktop makes this type of searching across multiple, disparate data sources very easy and quick.
Google Desktop caches data locally so you can search Gmail folders and even Web pages while offline. There is also a Preview option available.
I can also increase the accuracy and quality of my search results and save some disk space by deleting dated, obsolete or irrelevant information as I find it.
Another neat feature which worries the men in white (or black) hats is a positive bonus to me. Google Desktop can be configured to search documents and Web history from my home PC. This feature would be even better if my domestic email folders could be included as this would potentially enable me to reply to Dave's email message about drinks next Thursday or Friday from a hotel room in Prague.
Currently, I would have to call the wife, ask her to log on to the computer, educate her how to search in Thunderbird, locate the correct information and mail me the results. All of this is too much trouble given she moans at being asked to perform the simple task of setting the video to record '
Lost'.
The only minor issue I have encountered thus far is that Google Desktop does not search within WinZip archives despite claiming to 'search the full text of Zip files'. This is less than ideal as most of my formal reports are Word documents zipped up to save space. Just as well then, that there is precious little of technical value buried deep within those archives.
Coincidentally, Google Desktop has just been
updated to 5.1 (beta) with a dark, transparent sidebar, improved gadget support and enhanced security. Although I have experimented with the sidebar, I don't actually use this feature as I find it too invasive (i.e addictive and time wasting).
Throw away that Mavis Beacon touch typing CD.
This hilarious
video shows that speech recognition is the key to (not so) rapid application development.
Reminds me of working in tech support and the torture of spelling out Unix commands over the phone to customers.