New Google Things

As you can probably tell from that scintillating title, I've been working really hard lately and am completely exhausted. Hence the lack of posts in the past few weeks (or months).

But there's a bunch of stuff I want to talk about - like flow, and how it's easy to work hard when you've got flow; and my new TomTom One that I bought; and the Wii that I bought. But right now I'm struggling to form complete sentences, so I'll stick to an easy topic.

There are two new developments from Google that affect me. There's a whole lot of new stuff from them, of course, like updated docs and the new google phone OS, but that's stuff that I don't use so isn't really relevant to me right now.

What is relevant is the GMail upgrade. At first I didn't notice it, to be honest; when I did, it was mostly negative. A lot of people have said that it's amazingly fast now, but I really find it to be a lot slower than before. It's slower to load, slower to bring up your emails, slower to send. And often after I apply a label or achive a conversation, and then try to close my gmail tab, I get the message about how the server is still busy and I'll lose my changes if I navigate away from the page. Leave it a few seconds, and you still get the message; leave it a few minutes, and you can navigate away all you want. So for me, the Gmail upgrade is largely negative.

What isn't really new from Google, but is new to me, is Google Bookmarks. Often I'll come across something at work which looks cool, and I want to remember when I get home. So I end up sending myself email with the link. This works, but it's not really elegant. So today I went looking and discovered Google Bookmarks. It's really simple, and I know that there are other places that do similar but more advanced stuff, but this does everything I want. I don't want to share bookmarks, or turn it into a Web 2.0 social networking thing - I just want a list of things that I can add to at work, and read and remove at home. It's a bit schleppy to use manually, since you have to add the url, the title, etc manually - it doesn't pick it up from the page itself. But this does allow you to bookmark pages other than the current page. If you don't want to do it manually, but you don't want to install the google toolbar, a great firefox extension is GBookmarks. The only downside of it is that you can only bookmark the current page; the good side is that it picks up the title and all that automatically. It also allows you to create folders and organise your bookmarks, which you can't do on the Google Bookmarks site.

That's it for today - more posts on that other stuff coming soon.