Windows Tips and Tricks

Do you use one or more of the various Google Web applications? Here’s a link to get help files for a variety of Google services.

An example of a Web 2.0 application is the financial software called “Mint”. Walt Mossberg’s associate Katherine Boehret has been trying it. She gives some details about its features and comments:

Mint was created for 20-somethings like me who want to pay more attention to their finances but aren’t interested in taking hours each week to do so. This Web site worked ideally for me, and its clean interface integrates Web 2.0 features in a way that makes it a pleasure to use. I think it will appeal to a broad range of people who want to feel more in control of their money, but don’t want to spend a lot of time updating their information.

Another review is at Ars Technica, which says

Mint.com launched last year as a free Web-based service that brings a breath of fresh air to financial management. With a focus on security, users can tie their bank accounts and credit cards into the site, monitor and automatically categorize transactions, and receive alerts when bills are due, fees are charged, or unusual spending happens. Now, Mint is gearing up to add investment tracking to its portfolio of services, but the site’s utility as a financial management service isn’t quite where it needs to be yet.

Update: Here’s another review; this one is at Webware.

The real estate market may be having troubles but people are still moving and looking for a place to live. If you are in an area where Google Street View is available, a new mash-up can help you check out homes for sale. Google Lat Long reports:

We’re pleased to announce today that home buyers, owners, and real estate junkies can now find Street View integrated with the real estate listings, recently sold homes, and property records on Trulia. We’re excited to use the new Street View API to add efficiency to the real estate search experience and help home buyers discover more information about particular neighborhoods.

It began as a trickle of statements that the Web would replace the desktop. The browser would be the platform, some began to say. Now more and more voices are joining that chorus. Even Microsoft has a major program of Web applications. Is the desktop really going to be replaced by the “cloud”? No one knows for sure where this will all go but for your weekend reading here’s a selection of recent reports on the subject:

Dear desktop, welcome back

We begin with a post by Ryan Stewart, who outlines why he thinks that the desktop is alive and well.

Microsoft, Apple, and the death of the desktop

Next, we have a rebuttal by Ed Burnette who says why he thinks that the browser is the new desktop.

Squaring the cloud

Here we have a post by Phil Wainwright, who says that a new program from Amazon makes hosting your application on the Web much easier.

Microsoft readies ‘Albany’ subscription trial for consumers

Mary Jo Foley reports on one of Microsoft’s efforts at “cloud” subscription applications.

Three Certain Things: Death, Taxes and the Shift to the Web

All of the preceding links are from ZDNet but here’s one from the Bits blog at the New York Times. It reports that this year more people did their income tax with the online software from Turbotax than with the desktop version. Also more people are filing electronically every year. Thus it would seem that fear of “cloud” security does not seem to be as big an issue as might have been thought.

Google keeps working on Google Earth. Here’s the latest:

• New navigation - We’ve improved the zoom control so you can swoop down from outer space to street level in a single seamless motion. And with the addition of the “look” joystick, you can look up at buildings or across a mountain range.
• More, faster 3D buildings - It’s more fun to navigate through a lot of new 3D content. Besides adding thousands of buildings contributed by people around the world, we’ve added dozens of photo-textured cities and towns in the U.S. and elsewhere.
• Street View - The popular Google Maps feature makes its Google Earth debut.
• Sunlight feature - Never seen the sunrise over the Alps? Now you can.
• New languages - There are 12 new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

The New York Times and Google Earth have combined to provide a way to get the news appropriate to a particular geographic region. The Google Lat Long blog gives a description:

I read a lot of news by surfing the Internet, as do many of my colleagues and friends, and I’ve always dreamed of a way to browse news based on geography. What’s happening in Paris today? What are the top headlines in Japan?

In collaboration with The New York Times, we’ve come up with a solution: The New York Times offers geo-coded news, and Google Earth offers the platform for reading that news in a 3D browser.

Some details are:

To experience this new way of getting your daily dose of news, launch the latest version of Google Earth and make sure the “Geographic Web” folder is turned on. Click on a New York Times placemark and you will see the latest news and features pertaining to that geographic region. Want to see more than just headlines? Click on the “Show this layer” button at the top of the preview bubble and you’ll get a list of news articles dating back one month.

The computing world is full of jargon and phrases du jour. The “cloud”, Web 2.0, SaaS- what does it all mean? An article at InfoWorld sheds some light.

AppScout reports:

Now you can study up on national anthems from around the globe with All National Anthems, a Yahoo! Maps mashup that allows you to find your favorite country and play the national anthem by clicking on the nation’s capital.

The link for the mashup is here.

The Google Operating System blog reports:

Google Docs will slowly roll out an option to view and edit documents offline using Google Gears. Unlike the Google Reader implementation, Google Gears will automatically detect when you’re offline and will take care of constantly downloading the changes so that your documents are available locally.