Most Boring Weblog in the World » Cool Software

AJAX Write

billyboy — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 13:26:18 +0000

I know that Ajax, ruby on rails, and web 3.0 are supposed to change the web and the world as we know it but sometimes that products just do not live up to the hype.

Twice now I have heard about a Microsoft Office killer, first there where people saying the since Google has such a great text editor for Gmail that obviously Google will be able to leverage that into some kind of great online version of Office and bring Microsoft to it’s knees. Well at this point Google has a program capable of maybe matching Wordpad and I already have that in Windows now.

Yesterday I found out about a great new “Microsoft Word Killer” this time called Ajax write. The product was so fantastic that their servers were overwhelmed yesterday and today I finally got to check it out. A tabbed interface for a basic word processor that does not even really support adding pictures. There is a spell checker on the way and it only supports a dozen or so fonts. Now don’t get me wrong this is a nice start but on the Linspire page for this Ajax online app they say that MS Office costs $499 and this software is free. Sure a lot of people only write text in Word but that is not why Word costs hundreds of dollars. What about mail merge, tab support, importing excel tables OK this is more of a rant than it should be.

Enough hype already lets see some great software with real expectations

Screenshots of the next Microsoft Office

billyboy — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 19:02:51 +0000

Not really cool software but who does not want to see what we will be using in our cubicles in 5 years time

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

I love the new look. As it is the last three versions of Microsoft Office have all looked the same and besides Outlook I do not think I have used a "new" feature of office in three versions as well.

Top 3 search engines changing

billyboy — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 01:47:33 +0000

There are new looks coming for Google, Yahoo and MSN. New Google/Yahoo/MSN looks are just that new looks and at least Yahoo and MSN are looking to expand content in the face of competition from all of these upstart web news companies. Google of course is not under pressure to make changes yet although it would be nice to find all of the Google services on one web page to access.

The one thing that is up in the air still is Googles changes to their engine. With updates coming over the next few weeks there is a battle within Google to stay relevent with search results. Since Christmas the results have had a lot of spam but Yahoo and MSN have never picked up the slack in that department anyway.

Great Web 2.0 news sites

billyboy — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:43:43 +0000

I have lately run into the future of social networking and news and there are a lot of sites that build upon what was initially the great thing about Slashdot and make it so much better. All of these sites allow you to push up stories based upon users in one way or another adding personal significance to the story. Becaues of the openess of these sites opten you will get strong opinions in the comments, flame wars and occasionally tasteless stories:

Digg – Gives you technology stories that you can “Digg” adding significance to that story.

Blogniscient – Breaks down the most popular blog stories by category and then in the case of some breaks those down further. All of the political stories are tagged either Right or Left

Chuquet – Looks for links in blogs and news that are being linked around a lot to find the most popular angles on news stories

Megite Technology – Another brand new site with stories that you can have customized based on your feed readers OPML file

Reddit – Like Digg allows you to click and up or down arrow to add significance to a story

Shoutwire - A site like Digg almost exactly except it is new, not so many users yet and allow you to filter stories by what you are interested in. This is great as the site is more than just Technology and computers.

Tail Rank – Sorts info from thousands of blogs to give the most popular stories. Technorati kind of tries this on their front page but does it kind of poorly.

Tech.memeorandum – Also sorts top technology stories looking for stories that are most interesting to bloggers about technology. A little bit much of a clubby, look at me, cliquey site but still really good

Gabbr – Brand Brand new and I hope will become popular. This site has all news and top blog links or posts and tags everything

Tech Crunch – Although not really a current news site this site is more a weblog that posts about the popular new companies, prodcuts and sites that have to do with Web 2.0

Googling a toolbar

billyboy — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 12:40:35 +0000

I love the new Google toolbar and here is a great way that you can use it.The New Google Toolbar: Wow (Chris Pirillo). the toolbar still has the autosearch and autofill like before but now you can even create a custom button.

Oh and you can get it at Google.

How long can you last

billyboy — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 16:11:35 +0000

Get your head out of the gutter!

Escapa!

This is a great little game where you try to avoid getting your red block hit by a blue block. It’s much more fun than I make it sound.

Google Zeitgeist

billyboy — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 12:04:29 +0000

Google every month has a site called Zeitgeist where they come up with interesting things that have come up in search queries. At the end of the year they come up with the most fascinating and intriguing info possible. Google Press Center: Zeitgeist

And they also have a graph for Brad, Jen and Angelina queries. I think that stuff from google is really made by geeks for geeks but I hope Kerri still enjoys it.

Special Event google logos

billyboy — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 13:21:21 +0000

Have you ever noticed that any special event; Christmas, Easter, Mothers Day when you go to Googles website they will have a special logo for the Google logo? There is a guy at Google Dennis Hwang, and he creates all of those logos. The Design Weblog also has more Google logos that you can check out.

Visio

billyboy — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 15:45:59 +0000

I work with computers everyday and even at one point used to teach computer courses but when it comes to what I consider fluffier programs such as PowerPoint and Visio I was never to interested.

I have had to create a Visio drawing to be imported into a PowerPoint presentation today and now I realize one of those small but nagging things that has always been missing in my life.

I Love Visio

New Google Desktop Software

billyboy — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 16:48:04 +0000

Google has released a beta of the new Google Desktop software. Now it even has a sidebar that lists email, photos, weblogs, scratchpad, quickview, what’s hot Stocks and Weather.

The new indexing is not compatable with the old software so now I have to wait for the reindexing to complete. I hope there is a fix for the old indexing where it would continue to have an indexed copy of folders that I deleted but I of course don’t know yet.

Google Desktop Download