Web work

Google Calendar wishlist

Google Calendar team recently ran a survey, asking users what is it that they like and dislike about the product and how to make it better. Of course, I submitted my opinions, but, as always, better thoughts come after the action has been already taken. Here is my two items wishlist for Google Calendar.

[Update: not true anymore, see comments] SMS notifications for additional calendars. Google Calendar only supports SMS notifications for your primary calendar. But if you want to have a separate calendar for work and personal life, then you’ll have to choose which of these will send you messages to the phone.
Related events. Quite often I get into a situation where I need two related entries in the calendar. For example, I might have a birthday party event and shopping for presents, or a beer session at the pub and table reservation. Having just one event and a tonne of reminders for it doesn’t really work. Having two events however makes it more difficult to manage them. If the party was rescheduled, I’ll need to update my calendar to reflect the change, but I’ll also need to find and update the related event. It would be so much more convenient if I could just relate one event to another and when I move one (a couple of days later, for example), the related event would reschedule itself as well.

What are the features that you want to see Google Calendar?

Email is not dead

There’s been a lot of shouting recently about how dead the email is. Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, and what not – all were named killers of email. What a load of crap, I think.

Firstly, those who think that X can kill email, are probably misusing email themselves. Email is awesome for email. For other ways to communicate you already have chats, forums, mailing lists, blogs, social networks, and so on and so forth.

Secondly … nevermind. What I really wanted to say was that today I hit to edgy cases in my email usage. Both of them in one day – that’s rather weird. First, I noticed that my 7.5 GB Gmail storage is at 91% utilization. That’s a lot of email. Worried that I might run out one of these days, I cleaned up and reorganized some of the archives, dropping disk space utilization to 64%. Second (again, I know), if you think that I am just another pack rat and I store tonnes of useless stuff, you’re probably right. But, right or wrong, today I was asked to find some emails from 2010, 2009, and 2008. As early as I could get on that specific discussion. Not every day that I get request like that, but I was rather glad that I could satisfy it.

Thirdly (yes, I decided to continue), there is this really silly corporate world. In there, people still uses faxes. They still use emails. And they just started getting used to Skype. So it will take them a really long time to get off the email.

So, for all those of you who think that email is about to die, get off the pipe. There is a huge world out there, and you should go out and experience it. Over and out.

Backupify – your ultimate backup solution for the cloud

I have just learned about a really awesome service – Backupify. This a really simple yet extremely useful web application for those of us who use plenty of web services. Backupify, as you have probably guessed from the name of it, does backups. It can backup your data from a whole lot of services – Gmail, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, and so forth. Backups are stored at Amazon’s S3 service. And you have an option of using your own S3 subscription if you have one. I don’t so I chose to use the one from Backupify.

As I said, the service is extremely easy to use. You just register for an account and then specify which of your online profiles should be backed up. There are options for daily and weekly backups and email notifications. Support for more services is in the works too. And the best part of it is that if you register today (before December 31, 2009), you’ll have a free account forever!

But if you were late for the free cheese, I’m sure the usefulness of such a service is beyond a few bucks that they will ask you for later on. Strongly recommended!

Miro – king of online video tools

My online video experience until very recently was limited to watching clips directly on YouTube and Google Video, and downloading episodes of Diggnation once in a while. There are of course more places and worthy video podcasts on the Web, but I just didn’t have the right tool, and I didn’t bother enough. But all of that had changed. A few days ago I stumbled upon Miro.

So, what’s Miro? Miro is a cross-platform (works on Linux, Mac, and Windows) application for downloading and watching online videos. It has a really simple and straightforward interface and does a lot of magic by itself. You just search for things that you are interested in – either by keyword or by category – review the list of results, subscribe to shows that you like and Miro automatically downloads them to your computer. You can watch those shows any time later. Even when you are not connected to the Internet (such as on the airplane for example).

You can search through downloads, sort them in a number of ways, etc. After you have seen the video, you can either delete it or keep it. If you do nothing about it, Miro will keep it on your computer for a few days (defaults to 5), and then will delete it to save some space.

Miro also comes with a built-in video player, so you don’t need any external ones installed. On Linux, Miro supports two back-ends – gstreamer and xine. I had a problem with gstreamer not playing any audio, so I switched to xine and everything is working nicely now. As an extra bonus, Miro’s video player remembers your last position for every video you played. So if you just stop the playback and decide to continue later, you won’t have to fast forward – Miro will just automatically start playing from the point where you stopped.

Miro supports a number of sites for video downloads. With YouTube, for example, it downloads a high definition (HD) version of the video by default, if its available. Also, torrent sites are supported and Miro handles them automatically as well.

Miro is such a simple and useful tool that it changes the way you see online videos. For example, before Miro I could only handle just a few podcasts, but now I am subscribed to dozens. It’s like an RSS aggregator for online video. It’ll make you want watch more videos. And it will make it extremely easy to do.

Obviously, I can go on and on about how wonderful it is, but instead of listening to me, you should get Miro and give it a try. Let me know in the comments if you liked it at all.

Google Suggest for different countries

In a discussion slightly related to yesterday’s post, Sanjay sent me screenshots of Google Suggest for the same query in Google.com and Google India .

Can you see the difference? Now I wonder if Internet is the explanation (or one of them) for the India’s population growth in recent years.