Monthly Archives: March 2008

Google Docs Goes Offline

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

From Techmeme via Twitter: Google is rolling out (ie, not everyone can get it immediately) Google Gears, which is a first-step in offline use:

You’ll know you have the feature when you see a little “offline” menu item in the upper right of your document window in Google Docs… The feature’s first-use case is, “I’m amending a document and I lose my Internet connection,” Norton said. Document creation capability will come eventually… Google Gears runs on Firefox 1.6 and above (but not beta 3) on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It also supports Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher on Windows. There is no support for Safari, Flock, Opera, Maxthon, or mobile browsers.

Of course, this will mean versioning issues for documents created collaboratively if people are working offline. (Like on an airplane, perhaps.) More later. I’m not one of the first chosen few. ;-)

Update: doh! I hadn’t installed the extension yet.

Comcast Drops BitTorrent Block

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

Salon writer Farhad Manjoo reports that Comcast and BitTorrent have hammered out an agreement: “Comcast will now slow down access for people consuming the most network bandwidth, and will no longer delay specific applications (such as BitTorrent).”

Imagine if Comcast decided to slow down Firefox for everyone because some of its users download far more Web pages than users of Internet Explorer. It’s crazy to imagine it — but the company’s BitTorrent block was really not much different.

Of course, Comcast gives itself until the end of the year to implement this new policy, which seems just a tad slow to me. Still, it looks like Comcast realized that it was going to have to treat the bits neutrally, whether it wanted to or not. Will this act put a dent in the political impetus for legislated network neutrality?

This Is Just Wrong

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

The temperature in Seattle suburbs has been 32-ish at least three days this week. And when I opened up gmail a few moments ago, I was greeted with this headline:

I Can’t Believe I’m Writing This: Snow Is Possible Friday

Eeek!

I spoke on the phone this evening with a friend from middle Georgia (the state) … who said it had been 32 there this week as well. That’s wrong, too.

I remember  a freak snowstorm during finals week winter quarter 1978 or 1979 at Virginia Tech. But VPI sits on top of a mountain where snow is a normal winter affair. And finals week was last week!

Online Photo Editing: The War Begins

Posted on by Kathy E. Gill

Adobe has decided to tackle services like Splashup and Flickr/Picnik head-on and also take a side-swipe at Picasa. The new “product” is an online photo editor and storage site called Adobe Photoshop Express. I don’t know if the site is hosed or Mac-unfriendly, but neither the test-drive nor sign-up applications currently work with Mac Firefox 2.0.0.13. By “not work” I mean that I get a terminal plain gray page with a “Transferring data from fpdownload.macromedia.com….” message that never finishes … or goes away.

Adobe’s service offers sets a new bar for free hosting: 2 GB. Google allows 1 GB on PicasaWeb (and Picasa is an offline editor). Flickr’s free service allows members to add only 100 MB a month …but until December, there was no photo editing going on at Flickr. That’s when Flickr integrated Picnik tools into the Flickr interface.

I prefer editing photos on my computer, where response time is more immediate and network connection not critical. That said, for a quick edit from a computer that has no image editing software, Picnik is sweet! And it allows you to save images to your hard drive or to your Facebook, Flickr, Picasa or MySpace account. All without setting up an account. =:-0

Adobe is the 600-pound gorilla (well, so is Google) in this game. And some day, we’ll be connected to the Net like we’re breathing air today, or so the science fiction writers envision. Until then, watch, play and wait.