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 »

WorkSnug is a neat augmented reality iPhone app that enables you to find great places to work nearby, from cafes to coworking spaces, complete with reviews. Here’s a short video showing how it works:

After a few weeks of waiting, WorkSnug has been approved by Apple and is available for free download from the iTunes App Store. The app initially covers London, with coverage for San Francisco, New York, Berlin and Madrid to come.

Has WorkSnug helped you find a great place to work?

Google Apps is a favorite tool of many web workers, but soon it might be just as well-known to many of our cubicle-bound corporate colleagues. That’s because Google is making great strides into the enterprise, taking on the likes of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino with the enterprise version of the product.

With its recent earnings statement, Google noted that growth in its enterprise business was accelerating. That acceleration includes some recent large wins with enterprise customers for Google Apps — with some big names in the bunch, including Jaguar Landrover (15,000 users), Rentokil Initial (35,000 users), Motorola’s handset division (20,000 users) and Konica Minolta (7,000 users), adding to some large customers reported earlier this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Mozilla has made beta 2 of Firefox 3.6 available. If you are already running beta 1, you can use Help->Check for Updates to get the latest version.

Running the release through the Sunspider JavaScript performance benchmarks shows that performance is virtually unchanged from beta 1, but according to Mozilla, this version fixes around 190 bugs so it is definitely worth downloading (although I have to say that I have been running beta 1 on both Windows and Mac machines for a week or so and have had no issues so far).

Are you running Firefox 3.6? Let us know what you think of it below.

If you’re concerned that Google is starting to know a bit too much about you, you might be interested to find out that Google has released Google Dashboard, a window onto the data that Google stores about your accounts. All you need to do is go to www.google.com/dashboard and log into your account. You’ll be presented with a list of all of the Google services that you use, and the data that is stored in them.

It’s interesting just browsing through the dashboard to see the Google products that you use. More than 20 products are covered by the Dashboard, although my account lists several products that I use that aren’t yet supported (including Feedburner and Google Analytics).

Do you think the Dashboard provides greater transparency?

File sync and backup service SugarSync (which we’ve blogged about before) just announced new small-business friendly features, including a central admin feature to manage from three to 100 users collaborating and sharing files using the app. The new package also includes flexible group pricing plans starting at $29.99 per month, with no setup fees and free phone support.

While speaking with the CEO of SugarSync, I quickly realized that my post about running a virtual team was missing a critical component: backup. As I listened to the company’s presentation of its product, my mind began working overtime. SugarSync isn’t just about backing up files securely in the cloud. It can also be used for secure file sharing, collaboration and file syncing with cross-platform and mobile device access and compatibility. Read the rest of this entry »

Some big news yesterday was the announcement of the Bing/Twitter/Facebook deals that will see the three services sharing info and working together in all kinds of interesting ways. One of those ways has now gone live, and it’s Microsoft’s Bing Twitter search. It looks a little like Twitter Search, only better, and much more broadly useful.

What do I mean by that? Well, for one, you have Twitter’s trending topics, but more than the 10 you normally see, and they’re arranged in a tag cloud. I also noticed that some from the official Twitter search page aren’t actually present, but it looks like it’s cut out the hashtagged, frivolous stuff, and left the more meaty subjects. Read the rest of this entry »