Oren’s Weblog

A couple of weeks ago I used my Gmail account to send someone an attached Excel spreadsheet file, and noticed when I viewed the sent message in Gmail that I was offered the option to view the attachment as HTML, and sure enough, I could view my simple Excel file right in the browser (Firefox, in this case).

I’ve also played around with Google’s online browser-based spreadsheet and the Writely web-based word processor they now own.

I’ve long thought that Excel and Word offer far too many features for the average person (or at least me) to manage. I long for the original Word for Windows, which I thought was the best word processor ever – circa 1992.

All this activity at Google is obviously building towards something, and now Aaron Ricadela has an article in Information Week that lays it out:

Google this week will launch Google Apps for Your Domain, a software bundle aimed at small and midsize companies. The free, ad-supported package combines Google’s E-mail, calendar, and instant messaging with Web site creation software. It will be hosted in Google’s data center, branded with customers’ domain names, and packaged with management tools for IT pros.

Instead of trying to displace the hundreds of millions of copies of Office installed on business PCs, Google will try to snare users once they start sharing the Word and Excel files they’ve created. “The right way to view Writely and Google Spreadsheets, especially in the context of a larger business, isn’t necessarily as a replacement for Word or Excel,” says Matt Glotzbach, head of enterprise products at Google. “They’re the collaboration component of that.”

This is worth watching as it rolls out.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, google

Eddie Hargreaves writes a piece in the Apple Blog titled “Why I will (probably) not renew my .Mac account” that details changes made in iLife ’06 that screw up the way longtime .Mac users interact with the online .Mac service, particularly for photo albums.

I’ve been using .Mac for our family photo site for almost three years now, because it’s easy to publish photos from iPhoto and the software has taken care of linking the albums together, building the index, etc. But now it’s gotten harder, and the new iPhoto ’06 doesn’t even know about the albums that already exist on .Mac as it sends you to the separate iWeb app to create a web page that it stuffs into an entirely new directory on .Mac.

Guess I’ll have to look at moving my photo stuff to Flickr. What a pain.

And it makes me really glad I haven’t yet upgraded the family room iMac to iLife ’06.

But why now? If I’ve managed to rationalize the purchase in years past, what makes this year different? In a word: iWeb. You might think that the addition of iWeb to Apple’s iLife suite would be a reason for me to continue my .Mac membership. But instead it’s making me want to drop it.

It is still possible to use HomePage on the .Mac site, and create photo albums, but it’s no longer a one-click operation. It involves exporting the photos from iPhoto to a new folder on the Finder, uploading them via the iDisk, creating a new page on .Mac, re-ordering them and re-captioning them. If I wanted to go through all of that, I could use any of a number of online photo-hosting services. And it wouldn’t cost me $99 per year.

Technorati Tags: apple, osx, iLife, dotMac