Today may be a banner day in finding the perfect todo list option for me and my iPhone. Enter Google Chrome. For those of you who haven’t heard, Google has released a browser called Chrome.  It is clean, fast, and has some very interesting features that are growing more and more compelling to me all the time.

Google Chrome gives you the option of creating virtual applications out of online applications.  In reality, it is pretty simple, Google Chrome will open an online app in its own window that has the forward, back, URL, and other standard browser buttons removed.  It makes online apps feel more like apps that live on your harddrive.

Here is how Chrome and Toodledo have collided to give me a more interesting and integrated todo option. Toodledo has a very clean interface for the iPhone but their standard interface leaves a little to be desired. The great thing about Toodledo’s iPhone interface is that you can access it in a standard browser on your PC or Mac.  Here is where my head exploded…

I opened the iPhone interface of Toodledo in Google Chrome and turned it into a virtual app.  The Chrome virtual apps remember how they were sized and where they were in the window when you last closed them.

Long story short, I now have a todo widget that lives on the far left part of my workspace that stays out of the way that is always synced on my iPhone.  In other words, it is possible to use chrome to create iPhone app widgets that have their own window and live on your computer.

Adobe has just released a brand new online word processing application called Buzzword. You can find it at buzzword.acrobat.com. It is a very nice and clean looking interface that fades into the background as you create. That is nice, and it gives you some handy stats as you write. In the bottom left hand corner of the screen, it keeps you up to date on how many words you have type so far, something handy for those columnists who have to come in around 500 words every time. It also keeps you up to date on how many misspellings you have in your document. Something that is quite handy for those of us who are copying and pasting content written by others.

One thing I did notice which I thought was pretty strange. Even though Buzzword is housed at acrobat.com, you can’t save your document as a .pdf. What the…? Come on Adobe! Ridiculous.

My biggest fear for the product is that it may be a little to late to make a big difference. I don’t use online document creation much, but when I do, I use Google Docs. Not so much that it is the absolute best online document creation experience, but rather that they were first, and all my online documents are already there.

Good luck Adobe.

The following is copied and pasted from what I wrote using Adobe’s new online word processor offering, Buzzword.

Hello there you slick little interface. I just wish that I didn’t have such a backlog of documents in Google Docs. You see, this interface is quite slick, but I am not in this world. Flash is getting better and better, but it is so hard to shake those bad feelings I have accrued since the advent of Flash. There were so many sites that used Flash badly. You could use the back button, you couldn’t see the history, and for some reason, the fonts were rendered poorly which led to a ton of illegible, unnavigable sites. Yuck.

In comes Web 2.0 where we go back to standards and get back a lot of the functionality lost just prior to the big web bust of 2001. But, there is a problem a brewin’. With more and more money being funneled into Web 2.0 projects, the market is more and more palatable to larger companies who aren’t as passionate about web standards.

Are we going to go back to an era where tools such as Flash and Flex are used losing the ground yet again that was gained back over the past 3 to 4 years?

Buzzword looks nice, and maybe this rant belongs somewhere else. But is it nice try but too late?

One thing that I am noticing about this tool. There is a word counter and as of this word, I had typed 235 words. Wow that is an eye opener. I figured I had typed much more than that. I wouldn’t work out too good at a newspaper. Writing is like pulling teeth for me, and I realize it is the same for a lot of other people, but the finished product isn’t valuable enough to me to endure the pain on a daily basis.

I like being creative, but just in other ways. Blogging is only a hobby, and one that I don’t believe I will ever pursue much further than that.

I can’t believe that I never hear anyone talking about sharing interesting news links via Google Reader. It is such an easy thing to do and it doesn’t add that much overhead to your news reading regimen. Google Reader is an online RSS aggregation site. That means that through Google Reader, you can subscribe to sites that you go to and get notification when new content is produced. Cool stuff.

I have subscribed to a number of sites, some news, some sports, but mostly tech related. As I scroll through the stories, I look for interesting content. When I find something that piques my interest enough to read it, I share it. That creates an RSS stream of news that I find interesting. That has value. I go through the news and cull out the boring stories.

I will admit that my choices are highly biased by my tastes and what I think is important, but I would find it interesting to subscribe to friends news feeds just to get a glimpse into what they think is important.

Google Reader makes this so easy that I am stupefied that this isn’t something that more people do. We share our thoughts on blogs. We share our thoughts and location on twitter. Heck, we share everything. Why hasn’t news sharing taken off more.

I know Del.icio.us, the bookmarking website has been around for a long time, but I could never get into how it works. It has always seemed like an extra step. Besides, it was created before the explosion of RSS-ified content.

I went to Del.icio.us earlier today to see if there was a way to combine my RSS feed of news in Del.icio.us and couldn’t find it. It would be great if I could wire my Google reader feed to create Del.icio.us links, but I can’t make that happen.

Right now I am only following one news feed, and that’s Steve Gillmor. He shares news in fits and starts, but it is incredibly interesting to see what he finds interesting.

I am looking for more news feeds to read.
Robert Scoble?
Jason Calacanis?
Veronica Belmont?

There are a ton of feeds I and others would read. Why hasn’t this blown up?

If you like what I write about on this blog, and are interested to see what news items I find interesting, check out my Google Reader news RSS feed. Subscribe to it in Google Reader or the RSS aggregator of your choice. If you aren’t an RSS maven don’t fear. You can also see what I am reading on my Google Reader Shared Items page.

Yesterday, I finally decided how and when I would use Google Readers “share” function. Google Reader allows you to click a link called “share” that will make a list of news items that you find interesting. That list automatically creates a page and an RSS feed that others can subscribe to.

I have been using the share function on a hit and miss basis for well over a year now, but I didn’t have any rules.  Now I do.  From now on, if I take the time to actually read a story, I will share it.  Simple.  That means if the subject matter of a news story or blog entry piques my interest, then it is good enough to share.

How does that effect you?  Well I can be your source of sorted geek news.  Subscribe to my feed in your aggregator, and then maybe we can discuss the news of the day.

Finally there is a way to keep your online and offline calendar in sync. This is a big deal if you are like me and have had to enter calendar items manually in two places. What a drag. Google announced today that it has released a little tool that will check your Outlook calendar and synchronize it with your Google calendar. Hip hip hooray!

UPDATE:———————-

I just downloaded the Google Caledar updating tool, and it works great! It is extremely simple. You download it and it ends up in your system tray. Once it is there you can right-click on the icon and go into the options and specify how often you want it to check for updates.

I have been waiting a long time for this. I have a smart phone that doesn’t sync to Google, but I want to use Google calendar and now I can. Thank you Google!

The reason I migrated my site to a new provider is the need to have access to the server settings that allowed me to set up the Gmail functionality on my site.  The migration went fairly well.  Although, I keep finding little things that needed quick repairs.  (Not the least of which was my RSS feed was broken for a while.)  I hope I have everything fixed and working.

In a post yesterday I lamented not having Gmail functionality, well that is over it is now working beautifully.  My new email address is murraywilliams[enter and 'AT' sign here]murdog[enter a dot or point or period or what ever you call it here]com. (I entered it in that convoluted way to hopefully thwart people from scraping my email address from this entry…spammers can go to ….)

My other email addresses will still work, I have them forwarded to that account. Hooray!!!

I have started using the new service from Google that allows you to “host” Google Apps on your domain. I started the process of getting it all hooked up on Thursday of this week and so far it has been pretty cool. It was pretty simple. I went to the Google Apps page and signed up. I filled out the online form and that was pretty much it. I had to post some HTML in a specific folder on my site, but doing that was trivially easy. The HTML let Google know with certainty that I was the owner of the domain.

The Killer Apps

Once you have Google Apps set up on your domain,iIt allows you to share a family calendar, or a shared calendar with all those using your domain which, right now, seems like the killer app. Keeping up with all the things your family is up to is a real chore, and having a simple powerful calendar that everyone shares for free is incredibly handy.

I set Megan up with an account, and she immediately filled the calendar up with all our family’s upcoming plans. Super handy.

In addition to a family calendar Google Apps also gives you Google docs. I haven’t found a killer use for this yet, but it allows you to create documents that are available for everyone in your family. I can see where this could be very handy for a business domain, but in the family world, it seems to be fairly limited in usefulness.

If that weren’t enough, it also includes a built in start page based on iGoogle. It lets you set up a personal start page with a ton of different widgets that connect you to the information you need. I don’t use a start page much now that I have started using Google reader to keep up with the news that I am interested in, but I still like it. All the users on your domain that you set up with Google Apps also get a start page of their own.

I was hoping that there would be the option of having a common iGoogle start page that everyone on the domain could use. It could be a great place to communicate, but so far I haven’t found that option if it exists.

My Email Dilemma

It also comes with integrated email which means that my MurDog.com email addresses can go through Google’s Gmail interface which is incredibly handy. Right now however, I can’t get that running. In order for it to work, you have to update the MX records on the DNS server to point towards Google’s mail servers. I know that is pretty technical, but it should be a pretty simple thing if you can get access to it. The Google site has great instructions that make it pretty simple to make the changes.

I have a problem. My hosting service provider, www.thehostgroup.com doesn’t give me access to the MX settings. Or, if it does, I can’t find them. It is enough for me to start thinking about finding better hosting for this site. Having a personal email address that leverages the power of Gmail is an exciting prospect. I have sent a message to my provider in hopes of getting this resolved, but so far I haven’t heard anything from them.

One of the bad parts of having a personal email address that I have to manage is spam. It is a huge problem. I turned off my personal email address years ago because of spam. If I could get this Google apps thing to work then I would have Google’s horsepower behind spam control. It would be a huge help.

If I can’t get the email thing resolved, I might have to look at another provider for my web site hosting.

MurDog.com is just a personal site, and I don’t get any revenue from it so low-cost hosting is a necessity. If I can find a provider that is inexpensive, and allows me to host this WordPress blog I might be interested in switching.

For now, I will wait and see what The Host Group does.

Other than that, it is a pretty cool option from Google that should only get better.

I just started using Google Notebook today. I don’t really know what it does yet, but it has that twinge of cool to it. You need to check it out at www.google.com/notebook. If you already have a gmail account, then you are in.

It really starts getting cool when you download the browser plugin that allows you to take notes no matter where you are on the net.

Again, I am not quite sure why yet, but I feel like this is cool for some reason, and I wanted to blog about it.

Sights from Google Street View

A big shout out to Stan Schroeder at Mashable.com for coming up with a top 15 shots captured by Google’s brand new service, Google Street View. This is worth at least 5 minutes of your time.