Picasa

I discovered Picasa only recently.
Until now (confession time), I’d never used any photo-managing software; I just couldn’t be bothered.
But Picasa is nice. It’s very intuitive, does a lot automatically (i.e. doesn’t bother me too much), and has a good feature set without overwhelming me. I might yet get my pics organised.

This is a good question: When will Picassa go online?
It would make life a lot easier.

Filed under: Google, Graphics, Web Apps

Netvibes makes Google home page look tired

Within 3 minutes of exploring the features at Netvibes I was packing my bags at the Google home page I’d set up not long ago and lugging my stuff across to NV.
Not only is the functionality better and easier to use, it also looks miles better.
Makes for a truly pleasant homepage environment.

Update:
Just saw this post: Google rolls out the canons in the home page war.

Filed under: Google, Web Apps

Google Reader

I didn’t know about the Google RSS news reader … why did nobody tell me?
But then, there are so many betas knocking around Google, you wonder how they themselves keep track of them all!

I’ll try it out tomorrow, importing my file subscriptions from FeedDemon … that should be interesting.

Filed under: Google

Google homepage – not cheesy

A personalized Google homepage?? How cheesy, I thought.
Remember all those portals a few years ago, all trying to get you to use them as your homepage. Netscape, from memory, was particularly gruesome.

But as soon as I looked at the Google version (you need an account, obviously, like a Gmail account) and started playing around with … well, once you’re in play mode, you’re hooked.

I’m actually finding this homepage quite useful. It helps that there’s the Google trademark ‘no clutter’ approach. I hate clutter, which is why I ran screaming from all the other portal homepages.
You can add all sorts of items (news, bookmarks, gmail watch); you click ‘Add’ and then you can drag the item into the position where you want it on the webpage. Cool stuff – I guess this is done via Ajax?
The best thing of all is the Add Content -> Create a Section: Here you can enter any web address which puts out some kind of feed and the news feed will appear instantly on your homepage.

Filed under: Google