Orkut supports Indian Languages

On Orkut, it is now possible to scrap your friends in five Indian languages. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada. This feature has been going on and off for a few days now. I have been waiting to get a screen capture. Here it is.

There is little to wonder since Orkut is a rage in India in spite of all the negative publicity it gets once in a while.

Gmail – New Version

Two days back, I had a feeling that something had changed about the Gmail web interface. The More Actions drop down looked different, there was a message in red which claimed Gmail may not work well with the Firebug add-on and there were instructions to correct things, the page loaded quite slow, the mails loaded super quick, the loading box had turned yellow instead of red and appeared at the center of the page instead of the right top corner and there was a link at the top right corner which said Older Version.

I was using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8 on Windows XP. Firefox crashed time and again when I closed the Gmail tab. After a bit of researching I realised that my account has been upgraded and what I was seeing was the new version of Gmail. For the purpose of this post let us call this new version Gmail 2.0 and the older version as Gmail 1.0.

What’s new?

The pop outs which are shown when the mouse is hovered on a contact name in the chat section has undergone a total overhaul.

The nick name or alias of the contact can be changed on the pop out

The contacts section has undergone a total change. Now I have a three column contact manager. The first column lists the groups with the most emailed group selected by default. The second column lists the contacts in the selected group and the third column will display the contact details if one is selected in the second column. I have one gripe there. Under the group called Most Contacted, there are people whom I have not emailed or chatted with in the past 8 months or so. I don’t get how Gmail figures out that I contact them the most.

What’s Good?

Mails load on the click since they are pre-fetched

If I am in All Mail and refresh my browser tab, I am retained in All Mail and not taken to Inbox.

The email ID is shown on the browser title bar which helps users with multiple accounts to know which account they are logged into.

The new interface for contacts is a definite plus.

What’s Bad?

Firefox 2.0.0.8 on Windows XP crashed everytime I tried to close the Gmail tab without logging out. Well, no one else uses my computer so there are no issues with security. No problem with Firfox 2.0.0.8 on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon.

If I open Gmail and Google Reader, Firefox crashed.

The entire web interface seems to be unresponsive. Even scrolling seems to be slow compared to the older version.

Conclusion

The new interface was a good move. But as always there will be bugs with new software which I hope will be fixed in the days to come. In the meanwhile I am sticking to the older version when I need to get things done on Windows and use Evolution with POP3 on Linux.

Update: Nov 13, 2007: I noticed a couple of other things too.

• When I login to Gmail using Firefox (Windows Vista) I am taken to the newer version by default even if I chose to use the older version when I logged in previously
• When I login using Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista, I don’t even get to know that there is a newer version available. Am I the only one sensing something here?

If you find anything peculiar please let me know.

I got IMAP on Gmail

With all the buzz surrounding the IMAP feature added to Gmail, I wanted to check if my account created almost three years ago made it to the list. Yes it did. Well, everyone seems to be posting a screen shot. So here is mine

I am sticking to POP3 for now using Evolution mail client. I archive the mail I download via POP3 and its always available to me under the All Mail link on the web interface. So there is no real problem that I see.

Blogger Beta is now New Blogger

Blogger is out of Beta. Now there is an Old Blogger and New Blogger. Not all accounts have been migrated, but the work is in progress. I have moved to the new Blogger a couple of months back.

Just a few observations about the New Blogger. The bad ones first.

1. No backup facility for my  posts.
2. I cant read the Feed of my own blog even though I am logged in. My blog is only for authors and when I want to get to the feed all I see is an XML file saying “Unauthorized”

The good ones are of course listed on the Blogger site and there is a feature tour which helps in understanding the new features.

My post – First result on Google

As I was going through my blog stats, curiosity got the better of me. I Googled one of the search terms that made a user land on my post. I got the shock of my life. My post was the first result on Google.

Again I did a very human thing – Googled all the search terms. One term was the fourth in the list of results returned by Google. I am very happy that my post landed first in the search results. Obviously in a few days it might not retain its place. Until then, it is something to cherish

And this prompted me to do one more thing. I would start posting about things users search for. That way it could be mutually beneficial.

And for the envy of others, here are the screen shots

Zoho Sheet vs Google Spreadsheet

After Zoho Writer, it was time to get on and try Zoho Sheet. Instead of just writing about what it is, this time, I decided I will compare it with a similar product; Google Spreadsheet though it is not a separate entity anymore. It is now available from Google Docs & Spreadsheets

As I was researching on this, I came across this fact-sheet. This could be pretty old. But I will not be so specific about the details on what I list here. I tested both applications on Firefox 1.5.0.7

Rows and Columns

Zoho Sheet

I did not come across anything that stated the max rows and cols. But this is how far I went
Max Rows – 150. You can keep inserting rows.
Max Cols – AZ. For average use I think this is more than sufficient.

Google Spreadheet

Max Rows – 100. Insert after that
Max Cols – T. Insert after that

Usability

Zoho Sheet

Very easy to use. The user interface resembles a desktop spreadsheet. Standard tasks like align, sort, changing font, accomplished with single click

Google Spreadheet

Easy to use. Some standard tasks like sort need more than a click as these functions are placed in a separate tab.

Features

There are a lot of features on both these applications. But I have listed the ones that set them apart.

Zoho Sheet

• Starts with three default sheets. Sheets can be renamed.
• Has a fill series option which Google Spreadsheet does not have.
• You can create charts with Zoho which is not available in Google Spreadsheet. The charts get updated as you update values in the cells. Charts can be made public and shared with others.
• Comments can be inserted on cells
• Looks like there is a problem in un-merging merged cells.

Google Spreadsheet

• Starts with one sheet. More sheets can be added.Sheets can be renamed.
• Google Spreadsheet has a Formula tab which makes it very very simple to apply sum, average and a host of other Math, Financial, Logical, Date, Statistical formulae

Finally…

Both apps can export the online document to CSV, HTML, PDF, Excel and OpenDocument and allow you share, publish your spreadsheets. The Look and Feel of Zoho is better compared to Google SpreadSheet. You can upload Excel spreadsheets to both applications.

If you need a bare minimum spreadsheet to calculate a few things, you can use the Google Spreadsheet. If you need something more, then I suggest you try out the Zoho Sheet.

We all love screenshots, don’t we? Here is one screenshot from each of the applications

Zoho Sheet

Google Spreadsheet

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Disclaimer: This is just my opinion on what I had observed from these two applications after using them for a while for my own purpose. I might be wrong in mentioning something and features could have been added/removed by the time I write this. I cannot be held responsible for anything you do after reading this post. Always check with the application websites for details before using the application. Above all, I neither work for Google nor for Zoho.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Writely and Google Spreadsheets have been merged and will exist by the name Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Writely users and Google Spreadsheets will now be redirected to Google Docs & Spreadsheets. All the Writely documents have been migrated too. The interface for the Docs portion resembles the GMail compose window with additional tabs for other functions like Colloborate, Publish, Revisions etc.

When I tried to publish this doc to my Blogger account, I got an exact error message telling me that my Blogger account has been migrated to the new Blogger Beta. My next aim would be to publish to WordPress. Let me see how that goes.

We now have the option to manage our documents and spreadsheets together. A PIM and presentation tool could make a complete office suite on the web, similar to Zoho. It might happen in the coming days. Whether I am happy or not with this merger depends on how successfully and accurately I can publish to WordPress. As, I found out, the publish failed. No reason given.

Apart from the small glitch, everything seems to be fine. Hope that in the days to come, Google fixes this issue.

Google Notebook

Just as I was thinking about what to write on, I glanced upon this new app listed on Google Labs. Its called Google Notebook. It lets you take notes as you browse and sits within the browser window. There is a firefox extension called mini Google Notebook that lets you add with the click of a button. A similar plugin is available for IE which I did not test.

This product is comparable with Yahoo! Bookmarks but is more user friendly, flexible and allows you to manage your notes effectively. You can add as many notebooks as you want and add notes under them.

These notes can then be accessed from any computer using the web interface. You can share your notebooks with others by making them public. The power of Google is its search capability and it applies to Google Notebook as well. I have just started using it and will see how far it helps me

A few screenshots..