Web Worker Daily

As an amateur photographer, I like to have a nice image as my desktop wallpaper to provide me with some inspiration throughout the day. Thanks to a post on freewaregenius, I just discovered that National Graphic magazine makes a huge selection of inspiring images available for desktop wallpaper use for free. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, Adobe launched a revamped version of Acrobat.com, its web office and collaboration suite. This is the first major upgrade to the service since it left beta last summer (as covered by Thursday) and provides some much-needed productivity enhancements to this service.

An early concern of mine when Adobe made the leap to web services with Acrobat.com was that it was trying to be everything to everybody, but this latest version of Acrobat.com quells that doubt. Acrobat took the step of “crowd sourcing” its requirements gathering process for this new release, and incorporated over 35 ideas from Acrobat.com users into the latest version. Read the rest of this entry »

PC performance optimization apps normally make me nervous, because they can mess with the registry and end up removing something I actually need. But my Windows desktop computer has been driving me insane recently, especially with its sluggish startup, so I decided to give TuneUp Utilities 2010 a shot.

The interface is well-organized and keeps things simple so the user can fix one set of problems at a time. Its five key functions are maintenance, performance, problem fixing, customization and something called “turbo mode.” Read the rest of this entry »

e-tipi sounds like a weird name for a web-based service, and when you find out it stands for “Espresso Thinking Platform,” things don’t become much clearer. But once you find out what the app’s developers think “Espresso Thinking” is, then you start to get the idea:

“We believe that sharing an espresso in a nice café creates a particular atmosphere that frees minds and promotes promising ideas to expressly appear. This is what we call Espresso Thinking.”

It’s a nice thought, but is that really something that can be captured in a web-based environment? I recently talked about the same kind of collaboration (lack of coffee products notwithstanding) in an article about my beloved sketchbook, so I was eager to find out if I could recreate the experience digitally using e-tipi. Read the rest of this entry »

Two small pieces of recent Google news were just announced that merit a mention, since both have ramifications for web workers. First, Google has put a date on a Mac beta build of Chrome, meaning there’s finally an end in sight to one of the company’s most egregious oversights. Also, a new change to Google Wave should reduce inbox clutter, and maybe make it more usable for those finding it hard to adjust it (like me).

Let’s get to that great news first. While the “new” web browser has now been available for download to Windows users for over a year (the beta was first released last September), Mac users only recently got access to a stable developer’s build of Chromium, and that’s far from a release version of the software. Luckily, the new Mac beta is said to be on track for an early December release. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of year again! Yes, the holidays are right around the corner. But I don’t care. I’m more excited about LeWeb ‘09, which will take place in Paris on December 9th and 10th.

And since the theme of LeWeb this year is “The Real-Time Web” (a hot topic that we’ve been covering in depth in the NewNet category over on our subscription research service GigaOM Pro) I thought I’d take this opportunity to stuff your stockings with a few real-time goodies. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the banes of many writers’ existence (including my own!) is inheriting a slew of documents where the people working on them previously haven’t paid much heed to document versioning, leaving you trying to make sense of a mishmash of documents. On more than one occasion, I’ve been left hoping for a tool that would enable me to compare documents in bulk so I can get a mess of a documentation library under control before I can begin the real work on a project.

While word processors like Microsoft Word often include a one-to-one compare documents feature, what if you inherit a whole library of documents? Enter CompareMyDocs.com, a new web-based service from Nordic River, the makers of TextFlow, a version management tool. It enables you to compare multiple .rtf, .doc, and .docx documents. Read the rest of this entry »

I was very eager to get in on the Google Wave beta. So much so that I solicited invites from pretty much anyone who even mentioned it on Twitter for about two solid weeks. Eventually, my constant pestering paid off, and I was rewarded with an invite. After the standard delay period before my invite actually came through, I got to waving.

That was roughly a month ago. In the intervening time, I’ve been using Google Wave with a fair degree of consistency, although my time spent with the beta product from Google has dropped off significantly in recent days. I have a fair number of contacts, mostly professional, and it seems like the perfect tool for me, considering the nature of my work, which at the moment is exclusively based online.

So what did I do with Google Wave during the month I had access to it? The answer, sadly, is not much. Not much that I couldn’t already do better elsewhere, anyway. For whatever reason, I just can’t seem to surf the Wave. Read the rest of this entry »