I used Google Wave for a lot of things, a little bit of collaboration, but mostly I used it as a study journal. I found it to be a great place to keep notes, make them searchable, and organize them in ways that made sense.
I also would have used it to organize events, gatherings, projects, etc. with other people, if they had had Google Wave—but they did’t, in fact, that is the reason why progress on the Google Wave project has been halted, there wasn’t enough adoption.
Personally, I think that Google could have had more adoption if they had integrated it with their gmail. If it is integrated into gmail, then there will be more adoption, people won’t have to check both their email and their Wave account. What if they had a “Create a Wave from this email” button? Other recipients would have access to the Wave and would be able to see the updates (live and otherwise) that were made.
Oh well, now I just need to find some alternative, anyone have any suggestions?
Google is getting ready to release Android App Inventor, a desktop application that will allow anyone to make apps for Android, whether they have programming experience or not. I have to say, I don’t get it.
Sure, perhaps it’s a way to boost the Android Market Place, maybe the ability to create your own apps will attract an entire audience of people who’ve been wanting something like this, maybe other mobile platforms will follow suit. I don’t think so. I think App Inventor will be used by a niche market for people who want simple apps that they don’t want to pay developers to build.
Honestly, how robust do you think we’ll be able to make apps using such a tool? Think of tools like Dreamweaver. Yes, you can do a lot with Dreamweaver in the way of designing web pages, but you only have a limited amount of functionality without manually tweaking the code. That’s because you have to understand how a computer thinks to be able to design anything but the most basic programs.
Don’t get me wrong, Google may very well have integrated a lot of functionality and ability into App Inventor, but even if they have will anyone but software developers know how to use it?
Maybe I’m wrong, I guess we’ll see. What do you think?
I don’t give a whole lot of credence to rumors, it seems that they are only right about 20% of the time, but I do enjoy reading up on them. When people started talking about Google Me, I, like always, was skeptical.
It’s not that there isn’t any reason for Google to want to be in the social networking race, in fact there is plenty of reason(mainly advertising, Google’s biggest business) but how likely does it seem that Google would make yet another social networking site (in addition to Orkut)? The real question is should Google make something new?
I have to admit, as a big fan of Google, I’d probably be one of the first to sign up. Google doesn’t get everything perfect, but they generally give people what they want. I think that they would have a lot of users on day one, though I doubt that everyone would simply abandon Facebook. They could certainly make the privacy settings simpler than Facebook’s currently are. Google could also add a lot of new dimensions (not to mention a full featured implementation that’s less Facebooky).
It would also add a new competitor to Facebook, which could be a really good thing seeing as how a lot of people aren’t sure they trust Facebook lately (see here and here though interestingly enough, Facebook is still trusted more than traditional media according to one poll). So sure, there are a lot of improvements and reasons that Google could make in the social networking area, but should they?
Okay, I wanted to show my brother what I thought would be the best desktop for an operating system based on touch imput so I made the following video. Disclaimer, I did this on my MacBook using KeyNote (Mac’s version of PowerPoint)—enough said:
I would also like to point out that some sort of system tray would be important, I don’t know if I could live without a clock on my computer. There are a lot of things that would be important to implement that I didn’t show in the video.
Interestingly enough, just a few days after I made the video I saw something a lot like it on YouTube:
Okay, question: does anyone want to have a cluttered computer desktop? I sure don’t! That said, I love some of the tools that BumpTop will afford Google. I really like how you can organize icons into piles, but those are basically fancy folders. I like that you can zoom into a section of the desktop, crop, and post pictures on the wall. I’m a little wary about BumpTop being used as the main desktop though.
I am not a very neat person. If you look at any desk I’ve had from the time I was in first grade until now you will see a lot old paper in forgotten piles along with other things that don’t belong on desks. I try to organize it all, but I just don’t have the amount of space I’d like to “put everything in its place.” The computer is different, if I don’t have a folder for this document, I can make one, it’s pretty easy. Therefor, my computer desktop is nearly always empty. I think that Google will be able to use this in a tablet device that would be really easy to use and intuitive—but it wouldn’t be cluttered—at all! If I designed an operating system my default desktop would be completely clean, but I do think that there are good things about BumpTop that Google can use.
One thing that I think would be excellent to try out would be the photo and document preview the way BumpTop does it. On Mac, if you have a file highlighted and you press the spacebar, you have a preview that popes up, I love this feature and I use it all the time. With BumpTop, rather than the picture coming to the user, the user moves into the picture. If you want you can also crop it or do a few other things. What if you could do this in the Finder or Explorer (or whatever Google will call theirs)? I don’t actually know if users would prefer it, but it does seem to be intuitive.
Here in a couple days, I’ll post a video I made of what my ideal desktop would be. Until then, what do you think Google will use BumpTop for?
