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Tag "Google"

If you use RSS, Google Reader is among the best there is. So good, in fact, that I imported all my old Blog­lines feeds. The inter­face, the star­ring of impor­tant feed items, the shar­ing — all of it is addictive.

Recently, I started using the Vienna client on OSX, which looks good but it's a pain to man­age the feed list­ings in two places– Google Reader, and local Vienna.  Yes, you can import your Google Reader OPML into Vienna, but to have them synced, you need to import it often.

But that's a man­ual sync and not very useful.

If Vienna's user forums are any indi­ca­tion, the auto­matic syn­chro­niza­tion between Google Reader and Vienna is among the top requested fea­tures, and I can under­stand why.

Well, I won't be wait­ing for Vienna any­more, as the Adobe AIR Google Reader client is here, and it works like a charm!


The inter­face is very Mac OSX like, very clean and nifty. Just set up your Google email and password:

And you are ready to roll. Of course, it doesn't (yet) have the func­tion­al­ity to tweak font sizes or flag impor­tant items or share — i.e., a com­plete desk­top alter­na­tive to Vienna or Google Reader, but this is a fan­tas­tic start.

Google Reader Desktop Client - Adobe AIR

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The excel­lent Google Docs ser­vice has already thrown the gaunt­let in the Office doc­u­ment edit­ing space. If your needs are to have a basic Word or Excel doc­u­ment with­out auto­matic pag­ing, or foot­notes, or Table of Con­tents, and such, then Google is already a pretty sound option to do your doc­u­ments and save them as DOC or PDF files.

The best part is the live col­lab­o­ra­tion that Google or the likes of Zoho have made pos­si­ble. Online col­lab­o­ra­tion among team mem­bers was some­thing in which Microsoft has also dab­bled, but in its typ­i­cal man­ner of releas­ing "Enter­prise" fea­tures. No sur­prise that that has never really become the norm out­side some cor­po­rate microcosms.

Today, Google has upped the ante in the war for online doc­u­ment edit­ing by launch­ing the tem­plates. Sim­ple addi­tion to their rapidly grow­ing arse­nal, but a shape of things to come. From wed­ding invites to busi­ness let­ters, it's an eas­ily expand­able ser­vice. The API and "open source" exten­si­bil­ity think­ing of Google will make sure that you or I can con­tribute our own tem­plates to the gallery. Nifty.

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