Web Worker Daily

Earlier this month, O’Reilly Media published its latest title in the “Missing Manuals” series, Josh Clark’s “iWork ‘09: The Missing Manual.” It throws a spotlight on Apple’s office suite, with how-to guides for the Pages word processor, the Numbers spreadsheet and the Keynote presentation app.

Even as a devoted Apple user, no matter how much I want to, I can’t quite make the psychological break from Microsoft Office. I’ve nothing against the software giant’s office suite — even the 2008 Mac edition I use is a great collection of software, although it is perhaps a little over-featured,  lacking the intuitive web collaboration of Google Docs and not quite as elegantly Mac-native as I’d like.

Apple’s iWork ‘09 fares no better on web collaboration than Microsoft’s offering, but it’s certainly more Mac-native and tantalizingly low-priced, though it’s not as full-featured and lacks tutorials for new users switching from Office.

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In early 2007, tech luminary Tim O’Reilly published a number of thoughts envisioning a more cohesive and universal ‘address book’ application for the Web 2.0 era…these thoughts were quickly labeled as Address Book 2.0.

In the intervening period, we’ve seen companies such as Plaxo and Facebook seek to evolve themselves into the position of defacto social address books, but even such powerful companies have only offered uneven ‘hacks’ for integration with our email, cellphone and IM contact books.

Apple’s Mobile Me service has attempted to provide some of the ‘glue’ to connect these silos of contact data, but at a great price…and of course tied to the Mac universe. It’s also telling that Gmail still lacks a useful API to it’s Contacts data – perhaps data that should really be a standalone application? This has left an opening for companies such as Soocial… Read the rest of this entry »