CityBlogz Design Studio / Blog

Lately, I have found that I rarely have a need to use desktop software for any of my computing needs. These are the online-based services that I have found to be indispensable in my everyday life to organize, communicate, and stay informed.

• Google Gmail - I can access my mail from home, work, Wi-Fi hotspot, my iPhone.
• Google Calendar - Anything that relates to time/date/place/to-dos, it goes in my Google Calendar.  I can access this from practically anywhere.
• Google Reader - This is my online RSS Newsreader. With Google Gears offline support, I can catchup with all the latest news feeds even when I am on a plane.
• Del.icio.us Bookmarks - I find that I have not bookmarked a page in IE or Firefox in ages! Instead, all my bookmarks are on this handy service.
• MP3tunes - All my iTunes music safely stored and synced online with MP3tunes.com.  I can stream my music from the Internet.  This service doesn’t store and sync my iTunes videos and movies, so I use other means to backup and sync these files.
• .Mac - I use the iDisk service to keep any storage of files and folders that I need to access from anywhere.  The one other feature that I do like is the Photo sharing capabilities.
• SlingBox - Ok, its not really an online service, but its how I watch TV now.  Place-shifting means I can watch TV shows streamed online from any single Slingbox location.  Place one SlingBox hardware in your parent’s home in Canada and you can catch international TV right on your computer.  Quality is not the greatest, as it depends a lot on the upload speeds of the SlingBox locations you are getting the streams from.
• Google Docs - This service can almost replace your traditional Microsoft Office apps. Unfortunately, it is not as speedy as having a desktop app.  Speed and offline portability are the biggest factors in me not completely switching over to using online-based office apps.
• Google Alerts - This is how I read the latest news. I give search terms that I find most interesting, and everyday they will send me the top links to news stories and blog entries that match my keywords.
• Kayak - I give it my top flight destinations and the maximum price I am willing to pay, and I get a daily report of any matching deals.
• Twitter - This service is basically a mashup of fan site / blog / and alerting service. You can alert all your followers via SMS text, IM, and email with “what you are doing now”. I am still a little weary of letting everyone know what I am doing now, but I can see how it can be used to alert a large number of people at once, with whatever information you wish to share. This is most useful for people with a mobile lifestyle, who may not get a chance to post their thoughts to a blog.

Here’s some press about the Blue Business Platform (a project that I was involved with for the past year and a half). To summarize:

IBM said the marketplace will offer pre-integrated products and services from IBM and independent software developers. Customers will be able to use the software they buy on premises or in the cloud.

IBM is working with Google to build a worldwide network of connected servers, an architecture sometimes referred to as a computing cloud, from which it plans to deliver software and services.

The online store will be organized geographically and also by industry. Customers will be able to purchase software or services in just four clicks, IBM said. The company plans to pilot the marketplace throughout 2008

Read more about this from various sources online:

• IBM To Launch Web-Based Application Market - InformationWeek
• Google, IBM Join Forces To Dominate Cloud Computing - InformationWeek
• IBM to Build Apps Marketplace for SMBs - PCWorld
• IBM launching a platform for SMB opportunity - IT Business

Sorry… its been a while since my last post. Tons of stuff keeping me busy. I just recently stumbled upon an interesting feature in Lotus Notes 8, which I had not been aware of until now. If anyone has ever used Google Calendar to invite their friends/colleagues to meetings, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to see that invitees that use Lotus Notes will be able to accept meetings in Lotus Notes and have it update their Lotus Notes Calendar as well as the sender’s Google Calendar. If anyone has tried this out, please let me know how it worked for you.

I just downloaded and installed the Mozilla Sunbird desktop calendar application and tried out the Google Calendar add-on. It appears to be working. It allows you to read, write, and delete calendar events both locally and when you are online with Google Calendar. Pretty neat. Until now, there have been paid-for solutions to sync your desktop calendars with gCal. Now, we have a free alternative. If only we could write one for Lotus Notes. Hmmm. Not a bad idea.

Now that Google has breathed new life into the idea of having access to your favorite web applications offline as well as online, it has started to get me thinking of another potential benefit. We are now used to the idea of accessing our emails, calendar entries, to-dos, contacts, pictures, videos, and various other data formats in an online space. My biggest concern with putting everything in the hands of third party web applications is what happens if those companies die off. How easy will it be to export your precious data and import them into other web applications?  That is something to think about as we all move forward.

At Google Developer Day, Google announced the ability for web apps to be available both offline and online. At their Google Gears website, they describe it as: an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

At TechCrunch, they give a pretty good review of Google Gears. Now, this idea is not new in the desktop world. Lotus Notes pioneered the idea of “replication” for both online and offline use. This is Lotus Notes forte and cause of endless frustration at the same time. We’ll soon see how well Google will be able to work out the kinks. So far, the only web app that is Gears enabled is Google Reader. Other notable projects that propose to do similar thing are: Dojo Offline Toolkit and the Apache Derby embedded database.