¶ On using online applications
I have recently begun using the Google toolbox pretty heavily. I’m surprised at the sheer utility of the free Google apps, and how these have impacted my general computer usage. For all the talk about the internet taking over the computer, I never believed it… until recently. Now, the idea of a laptop seems more funny than ever before.
Let me explain and illustrate. In DEVONagent (my typically prefered browser), I have a Workspace saved. This is essentially a set of sites bookmarked and open together in tabs. They are Google Reader, GMail, Writely, and del.icio.us. Except for the last one, they’re all Google apps, and all available for free for anyone who asks. Additionally, they offer a surprising wealth of functionality.
I’ve been reading my RSS feeds using either NetNewsWire or Vienna on my mac. It seemed to make sense to use an app whose interface was very nice. I’d tried Bloglines (an online newsreader) and never really liked it. It was ugly, required a lot of clicks, and took me a while to figure it out. Where I wanted a facile, intuitive interface, Bloglines made me think. I decided it wasn’t worth the thinking, so I opted for a desktop application. Until I tried the new release of Google Reader. Being already familiar with GMail, the interface came with surprisingly little thinking, and it offers me the added benefit of deep feeds: it saves the feeds from way, way, way back. I like subscribing to a feed and discovering entries from months ago. And I like that sites like Lifehacker (who post about twenty times per day) never have their entries go away. Like GMail, everything stays pretty much forever. Or until Google goes belly up: same thing.
GMail, as Kate as discovered, is as full-featured as any desktop client (as far as our pretty primitive email needs are concerned), convenient, and fast. I only wish it had an “archive and move on to the next message” button. It’s a nit, and one that bugs me very little. With GMail, every computer has every email I’ve ever written since 2004.
Just for ease, I keep copies of my email on my local machine as well. I don’t store anything there except for critical, reference stuff that I want to be able to access offline. It’s a pretty small set. Most of the email is deleted off my local machine immediately, and, when the time comes that I need to remember that password or serial number or phone number, I jump onto GMail and look it up. Works every time. Woohoo.
Writely doesn’t work well with Apple’s WebKit (which powers Safari and DEVONagent alike). There are some features that plain don’t work. It’s OK. Because I use Writely as a way to save half-written documents in a secure, but accessible locale. If something is important, I’ll save a copy locally, but for short papers (responses, or short works in progress), I’ll save it on Writely. I then have access anywhere I can get to Firefox and get online. And it works like any primitive wordprocessor would. (I should note that I actually write in another program and save interim copies on the desktop. When I’m ready to pack it up for the day, I copy-and-paste back into Writely, er Google Docs. So I’m using a full-featured desktop word processsor except in extreme cases, but taking advantage of Writely’s, er Google Docs’ abilities as a word processor to pass files more easily. That said, I wrote this whole post in Google Docs. Through DEVONagent, no less.)
Except Writely has a couple of really nice features that make it special. Most importantly is the revision system, which allows me to make changes and then roll those changes back at will. I can roll back to any version in the past, or to a change made only seconds ago. I can compare versions, even if neither of those versions is the most current one. And I can even step through each version and see the changes from the previous version. That’s just plain cool. I can actually work with this.
The big downside is that with a WebKit application (like Safari and DEVONagent), I don’t have the keyboard shortcuts, nor even some of the menus I get on Firefox (or presumably Camino or Flock). Still, for getting text out of my head and into a document, even unformatted text like this, Writely is pure gold. I am, in fact, writing this blog entry in Writely. When it is finished (after revising from who knows where, who knows how many times), I will copy and paste it to 12 Easy Pieces1. Seamless? No, but the other benefits make it worthwhile.
Finally, del.icio.us fills it out. I don’t spend much time browsing around anymore. I don’t have the time to waste. But I do sometimes run across something that I’d like to look at later. Or something that deserves a closer look. Or something that might be useful to someone I know or at a later time. That’s a perfect use for del.icio.us. Plus, hey, it powers the sidebar on this site.
My curent GTD system includes an “online” list of things to do when I’m next online. Sometimes it is to look things up, or to find something out. DEVONagent is the right tool for that, but there’s also some stuff that I just want to check up about, or to follow up regarding. For those, tossing a page into del.icio.us makes it accessible from wherever I’m accessing the internet, even if I’m not at home. So I never have to worry about not having my bookmarks handy: they’re always handy.
There’s a few downsides to del.icio.us. Firstly, it seems too public to put short-term wonder sites. I mean, those sites that I want to look at when I’ve got more time, but don’t want to shout to the world, “Hey! I’m looking at sites about knitting!” I’d like to keep it on the downlow until I’ve thought about it for a minute more. To keep myself from impulse-bookmarking. Where do I save the “look at this tomorrow” list? Maybe I can easily make something private using the bookmarklet and webform at del.icio.us. I’ll have to look into that. (NB: I just changed my setting so I can choose to not share a bookmark. After I’m comfortable that a link isn’t personally embarrassing, I’ll remove the “do not share” flag. Otherwise, if I’m nervous about something, I’ll save it at del.icio.us and keep it private. Ha, ha, ha.)
Keeping those four apps gives me a complete internet toolbox in one window. That’s pretty cool that they’re all available, and all from one company (OK, except for del.icio.us which is owned by yahoo! But Google Notebook really won’t work with WebKit so I’m sticking with del.icio.us. Plus, I can waste a good deal of time with the feature formerly known as the inbox) and all are free. Now I really can leave my laptop at home and have pretty much everything covered.
Next up: Check up my options in working with Google Calendar2. I don’t mind keeping it offline, but, you know, it might be a cool switch. Maybe. Because a calendar is something I frequently need when I’m away from my computer and much more rarely when I’m in front of it. Keeping things in iCal and lugging around copies on the iPod nano and printed into my Levenger Circa letter notebook might be all I really need right now.
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1 It turns out I really didn’t do much editing at all. Not that it couldn’t use the editing, but that I decided a website entry doesn’t deserve the time I would spend on the editing.
2 I’ve looked into it, and right now it’s a no-go. I’m too invested in my iCal calendaring to switch to a fully online solution. Maybe in the future I’ll pony up for a hack that allows two-way editing (both online and locally), or I could just wait for Leopard, the next version of the Mac OS, which I believe has that functionality built-in.
10 November 2006