Googlified

As you may know, Google’s online presentation application doesn’t have the feature/capacity that allows users to download the presentation in formats that are friendly to other presentation programs.

Which sucks.

Now, there’s a service out there called myPlick that lets Google Docs users to convert presentations in PDF format. All you need to do is make your presentations (temporary) public and give them your presentation’s URL on this page. The best about myPlick is that you don’t even need to register, and it only takes only a few seconds to convert a whole presentation (your mileage may vary, the presentation I used was only 3 slides).

Once the presentations are converted, you can:

• Share them
• Embed on your site with the Flash player myPlick provides
• Download in PDF format, or
• Just leave it there as backups

Here’s an example presentation converted by myPlick, and here’s the original presentation I created with Google Presentation.

[thanks to Lei Jin]

Google just released a mobile version of Google Docs. It currently supports documents and spreadsheets viewing on BlackBerry devices, in addition of presentations if you own an iPhone. :)

It doesn’t seem like that you can edit the documents yet, but well, wouldn’t it be pain in the neck?

[photo by Steven Combs, used under a CC-license : thanks Duncan Fairley]

As anticipated, Google today launched their online presentation application at TechCrunch40 (though the site has been up since last night) and changed their wacky name to Google Docs in the U.S. and Google Documents elsewhere (previously Google Docs & Spreadsheets).

The application includes most of the basic features that you can find on a desktop presentation program (PowerPoint, OO.o Impress, etc.), such as image insertion, font styling, and background/theme changing. You can also upload files in Microsoft PowerPoint’s .ppt/.pps format from your computer and edit online.

Of course, taking advantage of being an “online” application, Google Presentation allows users to share and collaborate the presentation with their friends and colleagues.

On the presentation page, you can chat with your audiences who are watching your slide show (they need to be signed into their Google Account though). You can toggle the chat window by click on the vertical bar with the little arrow on it.

If I am not mistaken, you can only save the presentation in HTML format (Google packs all the stuff: images, JavaScript and CSS files in a ZIP file), meaning that it might not work with other presentation programs.

I believe that I am not going to fully switch to Google Presentation given that it doesn’t save files in formats that are compatible with other presentation programs and there are already some (privacy) problems within the application itself.

They beat the deadline by more than 100 hours, impressive. :)

UPDATE: I was right, Google Presentation does not support saving presentations in PowerPoint/OpenOffice.org format. “Google launches presentations, but shouldn’t have“, says Googling Google.

TechCrunch announced that Google is going to be at TechCrunch40, where “forty of the hottest new startups from around the world will announce and demo their products over a two day period (September 17-18) at TechCrunch40.” Google will also be presenting (though they are not a “startup”)  “in front of the main crowd”, says TechCrunch.

Google already missed the chance to launch Google Presentation at the Office 2.0 Conference last week, as Inside Google pointed out, so I think Google is very likely to announce the new product there, to fulfill its promise of launching Google Presentation in the summer (ends on the 23th). And possibly Google Drive as well, with all these events going on lately.

Well, we will see. :)

Stevel Rubel twittered that a mobile version of Google Docs might be coming,

Google Docs is readying a mobile version. Try opening a Google doc on the iPhone. There are links at the bottom to http://docs.google.com/m

I don’t have an iPhone so I can’t test it out, and the link returns a 404 status code on my Firefox browser.

[thanks Steve]

Google released a new API - Google Documents List data API (fancy name) - that allows developer to program third-party application to access Google Docs & Spreadsheet files using the GData protocol.

Right now, the API has retrieve, upload and search functions.

Perfect timing to talk about the “Google Presentation“. Summer is going to be over in about a month, how’s the progress going, Google? :-/

Google Docs now allows users to hide their document from the “All items” view and the ability to sort the documents by the name, date of last update, and how you share the document. You can also sort the documents by their star-status.

Now I am really concerned about Google Docs’ security after I found a XSS vulnerability in ThinkFree Online (reported, but not yet fixed). This is logically hypothetical: if a XSS vulnerability is present in Google Docs (which is very likely), then all active users’ documents may be accessible to, err, the bad guys.

So wouldn’t it be nice if there’s a feature that allows users to add an additional security layer (like requiring users to verify password) for the documents/folders the users choose to protect?

Google recently added a new feature to Google Docs that calculates your document’s readability based on the two Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test: Reading Ease and Grade Level.

You can find out about your files’ readability scale in Word Count under File.

Oops, did I break the formula?

[via DownloadSquad]

Google Docs & Spreadsheet summer intern Alex Komoroske created a small, but powerful application using the Google Spreadsheets API that can filter your spreadsheets “using easy dropdowns on each column”, or you can enter your own filter, which allows logical operators, regular expressions and natural language expressions.

Wow.

I reported a few days ago about the Ionut’s discovery on Google Docs’ not yet finished new feature, integrate with Encyclopedia Britannica. While digging around, Tony Ruscoe found a way that you can activate the new feature before it’s officially launched.

“It’s obvious why this hasn’t been released yet, but if you don’t mind the bugs and want to play with this feature for yourself,” he wrote, “here’s how to do it”:

1. Open a Google Docs document.
2. Paste the following code into your browser’s address bar and hit return:javascript:void(INCLUDE_BRITANNICA_INTEGRATION=true);
3. Right-click any of the words in the document to view the extra items in the menu.

Well, if you found this buggy version of the feature useful, then you might also want to install my GreaseMonkey script so you don’t have to repeat the copy & pasting again and again… :)

Note that Google doesn’t host the content from Merriam Webster, they inline frame the pages from Merriam-Webster.com instead.

The latest update for Google Docs upset me a little bit because they didn’t launched the presentation application that I was hoping for, but Luka from Zorgloob assures me that Google Presentation is on its way, since summer is going to be over in about two months. (I hope that Google was not talking about the summer in Australia, which starts on December lol)

During the previous update, Google hint the forthcoming release of Google Presentation by uploading the Google Presentation icon (discovered by Luka) to their public web server.

The day will come, eventually.

I don’t understand why Google’s making this sound like such a big deal, it’s just an interface update for Google Docs & Spreadsheets‘ home page. Other than “looking pretty” and “more organizing“, which I do agree, the only new feature in this “major” update is the Google Suggest-like search function for searching documents.

I am not sure whether Google itself is confused or they just want to make us get confused, they changed tags to folders.

Perhaps someone at Google decided the two syllable word Folder sound better than the one syllable word Tag.

UPDATE: Just learned that you can drag & drop documents into folders. This make me feel a little bit better, but still… I WANT GOOGLE PRESENTATION!