IGN and Google have mapped Liberty City, featured in the just-released GTA4. Places of interested are already cropping up, thanks to the community. This is just another reason in the list of many testifying to the sheer brilliance of Google Maps.
I’ll say it again: Google needs to buy Remember the Milk.
Remember the Milk is a task-management web-application. This may not sound like much, and rightly so, task-management applications are beyond ubiquitous, but it really is an exciting product that blows away many of the conventions associated with your average productivity application.
In particular, the RTM folks have spend a lot of time integrating their product with others, including three from Google (Gmail, Google Calendar and iGoogle; it also uses Google Gears for offline access and Google Maps for geo-tagging tasks). So, is Remember the Milk an obvious target for a Google acquisition? Clearly not, or they surely would have indicated something by now.
Nevertheless, this is an application that they should firmly set their sights on, particularly as they take the company into more corporate territory with Google Apps, where Remember the Milk could be really useful. The Gmail integration (achieved with the use of a GreaseMonkey-style Firefox plugin) should be enough to convince anyone; if RTM was available to everyone in Gmail’s sidebar I have no doubt the vast majority of users would find it useful. It’s a uniquely suitable place to locate such functionality: everyone views their email every day, a lot (like me) keep Gmail open for hours on end.
Come on Google, this is an easy one.
The most important programs in the World are those you install the moment you get a new computer, and continue to use regularly.
I just got a new Acer Aspire 5920 laptop (which I may review some time, although that may not be necessary), and so recently had the pleasure of rediscovering what are the most important programs in the World to me. Here they are in no particular order:
The first thing I installed, and I suspect the same to be true for many others, was Firefox. It needs no introduction; the best browser in the World. This was necessary almost immediately to start gathering other essential software from the Internet.
My favourite archiving utility, 7-Zip is fast, lightweight, supports everything and is open-source (my favourite kind). This was used right away, as many of the applications I would be downloading were archived (99% were zip-files, so I could have gotten by with Windows built in extractor, but man that gets slow when the archives get big…).
It’s very easy to love VLC; it’s really small and really fast, and can play almost anything you throw at it. It has loads of other features too, like network streaming and encoding/transcoding, but they’re not worth delving into right now. Sufficed to say, this is the quickest way to get up and running if you need to play anything.
Daemon Tools is a CD/DVD-ROM drive emulation tool, in which you can mount and run ISO images (it also supports other image files such as cue files Nero images). It sounds simple, but this is a genuinely great piece of software, and my favourite of it’s kind.
Microsoft Office being an essential piece of software is pretty much a given in any circumstance, but I thought it was worth mentioning the latest edition, 2007, in particular. I’m a huge fan of the visual refresh the Office Team has developed in the form of the Ribbon Bar; and as a persistent user of Office I can testify to its usefulness. This is good stuff.
One for the developers, this is my preferred source-code editor. It has a nice extendible architecture, with a variety of plugins available as single DLL files.
I didn’t get very far without an FTP client; FileZilla is the best.
CCleaner is quite simple; it cleans all the crap of your computer. Really, really useful. Don’t take my word for it, witness it’s universal acclaim.
Last.fm is one of my favourite sites at the moment, and I consistently have the software running for hours on end. If you don’t have an account, I strongly recommend signing up for one. In fact, get a premium account, it’s €2.50 a month.
I actually hate iTunes, but I love my iPod so I put with it. You can download the latest version here.
Adobe Reader is a well-documented performance nightmare, whereas the also free Foxit Reader is lightening fast. I have them both installed because Adobe Reader will create nice-thumbnails of the PDF files; and Foxit Reader will open them in seconds.
Simply because I love Google Earth.
Although I haven’t actually used Visual Studio in a while, most of my coding lately has been web-based, I know I’ll have to load it up sooner or later.
I guess that’s it; I’m sure I’ve missed a few, and this is merely a snapshot of the many, many programs people use day in and day out. It’s a small sample of the most important programs in the World.
Lifehacker has drawn up a concise tutorial to get you started on using the IMAP protocol, which the Gmail team rolled out earlier this month. Read it here.
I checked this out earlier today, and am generally happy with the results so far(not surprising really, IMAP is at it’s core far superior to POP). I do have a few issues with it however; Google’s unorthodox system of stars and flags as opposed to flags and folders, much as I love it in my browser, doesn’t translate well to an IMAP setup. I’m sure I’ll get used to it soon, but it’s initially jarring nonetheless.
For those of you unfamiliar with IMAP, here is a short article which should fill you in.
An entry posted on the Google Reader blog this morning announced Google Reader’s graduation from Google Labs.
The new logo confirms this. Most strikingly, there is nary a ‘beta’ tag to be found; could it be that Google has finally launched a 1.0 product!? Say it isn’t so!
