I’ve known about Google Docs since way back when Writely was first acquired. Up until now I’ve never really thought it was that useful. But over the past few days I’ve been finding myself working on some word processing documents both at work and at home, so I decided to give Docs a try. So far, I’m impressed. It’s feature-rich, and pretty stable. Hell, it seems to work faster than Word ever has on my Powerbook. Browser-based applications have the unfortunate characteristic of having their most powerful feature also being their greatest weakness; Because Google Docs is online and accessed through a Web browser, I can get to my stuff from anywhere without have to copy any files from one place to another. But the downside is, I have to be connected to the Web in order to use it.Not that that’s a huge problem. Let’s face it, a modern computer not connected to the Internet is crippled. And what with the growing ubiquity of Wi-Fi, there are very few places I would want to take my Powerbook that wouldn’t have Web access.
So, for the moment, Google Docs is finding it’s way into my everyday work and personal writing. As a matter of fact, I’m writing this entry from Google Docs.
Some features I love:
- The ability to E-mail the currently open document both as the body of the email or as an attachment in a variety of formats.
- Collaborating on documents. (Although I haven’t actually gotten to use this yet.)
- Being able to check all past revisions of the document.
- The ability to export in practically any format.
Some features I’d love to see:
- Easier insertion of special characters. (You know all those Adobe character shortcuts? Those are great…)
- Ability to upload PDF documents just like I upload Word and OpenOffice documents.
- “Preview” mode that shows page margins and accurate line breaks.
- Ability to Save As an external document format, work on that document in an external application (let’s say while offline in the woods or something), and then upload the document so it “re-joins” the original document as the next revision.
- Better find and replace.
It’s real.
I think it’s the music that gets me.
Gosh, has it really been a month since I’ve posted? Have I really only read 4 books so far this year? I guess I’ve been a rather bad blogger as of late, and a rather bad communicator in general. I’ve been working a lot. Couple of 50+ hour weeks. Nothing too dramatic. We’re in the middle of a system upgrade which I’m heavily involved in implementing, so I’m being pulled in a lot of directions at once. Anyway, boring, right? On to the book:
I’m not sure why it took me so long to read this book. It’s frustrating on a couple of levels. Mainly, I’m interested in the subject of emergent behavior and bottom-up methods of problem solving. And Johnson isn’t a boring writer. On the contrary, he keeps his points simple and transitions from one thought to another with relative ease. I suppose maybe my brain was easily saturated by all the technobabble, most of which I understood but was still bored by. I suppose my one criticism of the book would be Johnson’s practically evangelistic support of emergent programming. I mean, I can see where using swarm logic to solve the problem of the shortest distance between two points makes sense. But one point that Johnson failed to mention is that self-organizing systems are massively inefficient. They require enormous amounts of computing power and memory, not to mention the prep work involved in setting up the rules of the systems. Plus, once you’ve established the rules and pushed all the agents into action, there is no predicting when — or if — the system will ever produce a viable result. Instead of spending that much time and energy creating and executing a program that will solve a problem, why not just solve the problem yourself?
Also, since the book was originally published in 2001, many of the cutting-edge references and short-term predictions are a tad dated. I mean, “The Sims Online” was moderately successful, but it has fallen short of redefining gaming as we know it. In addition, Will Wright has moved on to developing “Spore” anyway.
Johnson’s interpretation of the 21st century Web culture is spot on. Few people have such a grasp on the Internet’s influence on culture and society as he does. That being said, I sometimes found myself wishing that his book would read more like an anthropological study and less like a press release trying to sell me a piece of software.
Also, I’ve already had several conversations with people on how the queen ant isn’t really a monarch at all. That tidbit alone (albeit not exactly an original Johnson idea) was worth the price of the book.
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