Month: May 2009

Google has an entire office suite online called Google Docs. You can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations completely within your web browser. I find this great for stuff that I need to have access to from many computers. All of the apps have nearly all of the features that you’ve come to expect from a desktop application, and a few that you just can’t get. For example, there’s a widget in the spreadsheet app that will mark up a Google map with a list of location’s that’s in your spreadsheet. This is a fun little toy to play with in my spreadsheet that tracks all of the traveling that I’ve done for work.

Bonus Tip: You can use Google Docs from your phone. Any phone can view documents, and some higher end phones can even make edits to documents.

TweetDeck is a Twitter client that helps you keep track of everything on your timeline. It’s core feature is a multi-column view that lets you group your tweets together however you’d like. You can add friends to groups, so their tweets will always show up in a particular column. A column can also be configured for search, so you’ll see any tweets with your search term in them. I often use search when watching a prime-time TV show live, to see what other people are saying about it, or to see if anyone picks up on some subtlety that I may have missed. It can make TV watching a very interactive experience.

Handbrake is a video transcoding application. Most people use it to shrink videos down to a size that their iPod/Phone can handle. For transcoding software, it’s very easy to use, with presets for a lot of common formats and handheld devices. Select the file and what you’re going to use it on and you’re ready to go. The software also has all of the nitty-gritty options that you could possibly need to fine tune the video output you get from it. Finally, it’s multi-threaded, meaning that it will use all of the available processors on your system which gives it a huge performance increase.

A few months ago Google rolled out Google Mobile Sync. This syncs your Google calendar and contacts to your mobile phone. On Windows Mobile, you don’t even need any software for it. It runs right through the built in Active Sync interface in Windows. Syncing happens very quickly, and it is very smart about resolving conflicts when both the mobile and on-line calendars change. I was surprised to see that Sync also pulled the photos from my phone that are associated with contacts and put them into GMail contacts as well.

Bonus Tip: When you’re using Google calendar, or a widget, use natural language to enter your events. “Lunch with Jim 12:30 Tuesday at Quiznos” Google will figure out and fill in the date, time, event and location and set up the appointment automatically.