Techapilla

This week’s treat is del.icio.us. Techapilla installed the del.icio.us Firefox extension back when it first came out. But the tagging icon, which is supposed to let users add new URLs wouldn’t behave, so Techapilla resorted to adding URLs to del.icio.us manually. Of course, this was more trouble than it was worth, so del.icio.us got metaphorically binned. And the Techapillian eyebrow has been oftentimes raised ever since, at hearing of yet another somebody singing the benefits of this troublesome software.

But Techapilla is always fair, and to prove it, gave del.icio.us another go. This time, the report is much more positive. The bug with the tagging feature has been fixed, so Techapilla can actually see some worth in this software now.

Some worth, that is. A bit. Not a lot. Techapilla doesn’t care much about websites per se. Except for work purposes, anyway. For everyday use, blogs are much more dynamic and interesting. And almost everything that del.icio.us can do in this respect, Google Reader can do so much better. del.icio.us probably is a little ahead in terms of social networking, but other than that, Techapilla is of the decided opinion that Google Reader comes up trumps in everything else.

It is always handy to be able to access your bookmarks when you’re idling time away on Stradbroke Island, far from your home computer. But even this feature of del.icio.us’s is easily replicated by carrying a version of Portable Firefox on a USB key. So Techapilla doesn’t need del.icio.us. All the things Techapilla would wish it to do are already being well done by tools that Techapilla already uses anyway.

I like iGoogle. A bit like the Deakin portal, but much easier to use, and lots more widgets. Don’t know that I’ll use it regularly, though, as I’m pretty dedicated to my current home pages; but am giving it a fair chance by making it another of my home pages on my “at home browser”. So we’ll see how that shapes up. Most of the tools I normally use quite frequently, such as Wikipedia and Dictionary.com are available through a widget.

It would be nice if it was possible to customise the widgets a bit more; I might be able to get rid of my usual home pages in that case.

Was surprised to discover that only one of my favourite author’s books is available in Google Books in full text. A goodly proportion are now out of copyright, and many are available on Project Gutenberg.

There are a few other free ebook sites similiar to Google Books and Gutenberg out there on the Web, including one at UPenn. See also Bruce’s Oz Free Books page. You need lots of time to explore all the goodies on these sites. One day when I have more time …

Trying very hard here to keep up with the 23 Things. Anyway, latest task is Google Docs, which offers relatively basic word processing, spreadsheet and presentation apps. They are a bit slower and a little trickier to use than the standard Word applications; but I think the latter point just requires getting used to the different icons. The colours of the screens on my home computer are also a little hard to define; can’t really see the boxes, grids etc. very well. There may be some tweak I could make to my settings to improve that situation; but that can wait for another day.

Definitely these tools are a bit of a boon. Not quite as flexible as using software loaded on your own computer – what if you can’t log on to the Internet? But a great way to co-author documents with other people.

My test spreadsheet doc is here. Sorry it’s not the one I was supposed to create, but I didn’t think that would matter.

Google Maps is a pretty good tool, like most of the Google apps I’ve seen. The street directions are surprisingly detailed, and the mashup with Google Earth is a great feature. It could be made a little smarter – it would be nice if you could request directions between names of places, not just streets. And the directions given when two streets merge into one are a little vague. Some people are never happy, eh?! Still, am sure that these minor issues will fixed one day.

Of course, half the fun of playing with something like Google Map’s direction feature is in trying to catch it out. Am happy to report that I succeeded first try! Google Map isn’t quite clever enough to detect when no right turns are permitted into side streets. I haven’t tried to trick it with one-way streets, but would be interesting to know how it handles them.

What a change from the garish MySpace! I immediately felt much more comfortable with Facebook.

Haven’t done a lot with it yet, as time is pressing. But I did fulfill my 23 Things committment for this tool. Will try to get back to it when I have more time.

So far it has been quite fun exploring the various 23 Things tools. I was already aware of most of them, but hadn’t actually used all, including Facebook. So this was a good opportunity to explore further.