Cllr. Gavin Ayling

Google’s Search History on my personalised homepage today had a few items that I most certainly did not search for and that were made while I was at a Council meeting and while no-one was using my PC at home (I checked).

So it seems Google have a security leak which is troubling at the very least. Suffice I’ve changed my passwords for everything (which took some time as you may imagine!)

I suggest you change yours too.

I have always been frustrated with software and computer-based services. Office 95, 97, 2000 and even 2003 weren’t particularly good programs. Alta Vista used to find bizarre results back when it was the number one search engine and Internet Explorer versions 1 to 6 were buggy security-nightmares which didn’t draw pages according to the rules.

But we have turned a corner. Over the last few months Microsoft has been making some truly excellent software available in Beta form. Most of Office 2007 is excellent and last night I found some more features of Word 2007 which have blown me away. The Styles along with integrated colour schemes make making a Word document look pretty a matter of choosing options, rather than having an eye for colours (which I don’t). The same is true of Excel’s graphs.

Windows Media Player 11 has all the buttons you need where you need them so that I have not yet had a need to use the old-fashioned File, Edit menus etc. Internet Explorer 7 just works and may well be Internet Explorer 4 to Mozilla’s Netscape.

At the risk of sounding like everyone else associated with the industry, Google is making amazing strides. I read a review of Google Spreadsheets the other day which was not particularly flattering. But I tried it last night and was reasonably impressed. And today I invited a couple of people into an open spreadsheet and integrated Instant Messenging along with the instant update of edited fields makes this spreadsheet program absolutely crucially powerful. No longer will someone say to me “Can you help me with this spreadsheet?” and have to wait for me to walk to their desk, now they can open it in Google Spreadsheets and we can both see the spreadsheet while I help them out.

Instead of pinging around large Excel spreadsheets (so long as they have no macros), I can just open the original file in Google Spreadsheets and invite people to view or edit it. It really is the beginning of a new era.

But the killer feature is Google Spreadsheet’s use of the ribbon bar.

“File”, “Edit” and “Window” are living out the end of their days. They were always more suited to non-graphical systems and now that they’re dead, we can see what imaginative design of software can achieve.

It’s a popular view, but I believe home users and, for selected files, business users will soon be using Google-esque Writely and Google Spreadsheets clones. Google Calendar, Google Mail and whatever else it brings out in the future with typically no fanfare, will be the killer apps of the future. Microsoft will continue to provide for those who need powerful software but that won’t be me, I’m quite sure.

It’s only a matter of time, now, before Google starts targetting Adobe’s suite of products and I, for one, cannot wait!

Finally, I tried Windows Vista but the MD5 for the download was incorrect so I’m trying again now, I’ll let you know how wonderful it is shortly!

Google have today launched Google Calendar.

There are two reasons (that I have discovered so far) that it is not yet ready for the UK:
- It can remind you by SMS of events you have scheduled in your calendar only in the US;
- It can locate your meeting for you by Google Maps based on the location you enter, but only for the US.

There are also two teething problems so far:
1. Importing my work calendar from Outlook created all the events in the evening which were actually supposed to be in the day. Events at 9am were instead starting around 7pm (1900) and all other events were in the same relative position.
2. Importing a calendar of UK Public Holidays (one of the most powerful features of Google Calendar IMHO) fails completely as does any other calendar I try to import (like a schedule of XX football team’s fixtures).

Other than those comments, though, this is set to change the way we do business. If you have a meeting with clients from another company, check their Google Calendar and you know when’s convenient for them. If you have a heavy schedule and fail to see friends because of it, share your calendar with them and organise time in a transparent way.

The calendar can be shared either completely or by showing time free/busy or not shared at all. You can invite people to create their own Google Calendar and, when you start to type in the e-mail address, the addresses you have saved or previously typed into Gmail suddenly appear.

It really is excellent — I haven’t yet finished playing.

If you want to try it out, try and view my calendar using my gmail account which is my name with a full-stop between each of my names!

How long before most of what you do relies on Google? I already rely on it!