Alcides Fonseca

As mentioned before, I started to use Google Reader and Mail a while ago and now I have a few ideias for Google to implement:

First of all, why not a optional external CSS file for all my account of google. It would affect my google reader, mail, iGoogle, etc… This matters to power users who chose (as I did) google apps because they access it from various devices. And it wouldn’t cost a thing! Yeah, I use GreaseMonkey but when I use computers that are not mine, it sucks. I don’t like google’s design, it’s too white and blue…

I use Google Talk (in which webcam support is missed a lot) and I love the notifications for mail, but I would like to delete and mark as read right there, because only from reading the title, most times I already know what I should do with it.

Other of the things that I do really miss is a GReader and GMail desktop. Everything would be smoother and much faster running from the OS. I think Google is too ahead of real users, those who aren’t ready to move everything into the browser. In this aspect Microsoft is being slower keeping desktop apps like Windows Live Mail and Writer.

Just some ideas from someone who has been using Google apps almost every hour.

In a world where GTD matters to everyone, Sérgio came up with an idea: Why wouldn’t we use twitter to record some notes? Since you have twitter in almost every platform (mobile phone, PDA, desktop (windows,mac,linux), web, you name it!) it is a good way of posting messages from anywhere and use the API to organize them.

That’s what he did the last week. Started a Rails project, added Twitter4r and a bunch of pluggins and coded a bit lot. As for me, I just made the design and artwork. The layout was based on twitter’s since twitternotes users are used to it.

So, go ahead to http://www.twitternotes.com and login. Then use your favorite twitter client and post something like + i have to tell everyone about twitternotes and that’s it! And you will even tag that message with “twitternotes”. Simpler is impossible!

In the last days I’ve been using Outlook 2007 because it is the only decent app that syncs perfectly with my PocketPC. In my opinion, it is kind of heavy, I dont like the interface pretty much, and I dont have POP3 sync with the PDA. I also wanted a web-based version to see in the lab computer. Then I decided I would change to Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Reader because they had a web mobile interface that worked pretty fine in PocketIE. Said goodbye to Flock (we spend wonderful time together…) and installed Firefox 2.0 and the basic addons.

First thing I noticed in Google Mail and Reader was that “Google design” I really hate. Solution: Installed Stylish and then some skins to make it usable to me. Then I noticed Greasemonkey also had the same skins, so I changed the plugin, and now I have the theming + some hacks in one pluggin.

Google is the number one big company when coming to Web Apps, but as they did with Google Desktop, GTalk or GMail mobile ( btw JAVA, so it sucks on Windows Mobile), they should get a desktop application where we had Calendar, Reader, Mail, and maybe others, all together and syncing with the mobile versions( and no, I can’t use POP3 with most of clients, because I have a few other accounts in gmail, and it answers always through the default address).

I am working on a web-based application that will have all the things I use in my department (webmail, sftp, calendar, news, etc) all together, and then I will abandon google stuff, that I dont like using much :/

EDIT: I have tried pyRfeed and after a few hacking, it worked. Not very nice now, but I'll keep an eye on it in the future.