Dress Up Your Computer for the Holidays

There are some fun ways to get you in the holiday spirit this season by dressing up your computer. Although many of us hoped that the iGoogle holiday themes would arrive, so far they have yet to materialize (the photo album of images was discovered here). But you can still dress up your Firefox browser with the Tinseltown Firefox theme. This theme includes imagery like Christmas lights, reindeer, presents, and snow. Another Firefox theme, X-Mas, brings animated snowfall to the Firefox toolbar, fairy lights that become scrollbars, and animated toolbar icons like a smoking chimney, a present, and a fir Tree. Since the animated snowfall can eat up CPU usage, a light version without the snow is also available here. For desktop wallpaper, a quick search on flickr brings back tons of results for holiday-themed wallpaper. Another old favorite of mine is Kate.net’s pages of holiday wallpapers and screensavers. Microsoft offers free “Winter Fun” screensavers and a Christmas Theme for Windows XP. Users of Stardock’s WindowBlinds software can even go all-out and download holiday Windows themes like White Christmas and Candy Cane Lane. (WindowBlinds isn’t free, but a free trial is available, which is long enough to get you through the season). Finally, if you like the picture in this post, click here for a larger version of this adorable Christmas wallpaper, which you can set as your desktop background.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

To begin with, the Google Calendar service has just released an interesting update - now users of Google Calendar can sync their calendar with their Blackberry mobile phones. Using a new application called Google Sync, you can see your appointments and daily schedule in your Blackberry’s native calendar, even when you don’t have any network coverage. You can be alerted to upcoming appointments with sound or vibration as you choose, and you can add appointments on your Blackberry and have them sync back to your Google online calendar. You can get Google Sync by pointing your Blackberry phone’s browser to http://m.google.com/sync.

Google also released a suite of mobile applications for Blackberry phones, which can be accessed by downloading the Google Mobile Updater application. The Mobile Updater app lets you get the latest Google mobile apps, including Google Maps for Mobile with My Location, Picasa Web Albums, Google Docs, Gmail, News, as well as the Mobile Updater app itself, which makes sure all the Google apps stay up-to-date. You can download the suite to your Blackberry by going to mobile.google.com from your phone. You can either pick and choose which applications you want to install, or you can download them all. Although the Mobile Updater adds new shortcuts to your Blackberry’s desktop, some icons, like Google Docs and Picasa, are just links to a mobile webpage, where you can sign into the Google service you want. The links on this mobile webpage include links to services not included in this “Mobile Google Pack,” like Calendar, SMS, Goog-411, Reader, Blogger, and Notebook.

Since I already use Gmail and Google Maps, a suite like this that adds more value with additional apps and keeps them up-to-date for me is a really useful service. I only wish that the suite had included a “real” mobile version of Google Reader. Reading feeds using a mobile browser is not the best experience. Until something better comes along, I’m sticking with Newsclip, a handy mobile feed reader I downloaded ages ago. I don’t know what happened to it, but, by the looks of it, it got rebranded as Viigo for Blackberry. At least it’s still free.

Lately, I’ve been reading about some new ways to work with your documents offline and then sync them back to an online service. While initially this seems to go against the idea of an online office suite, working offline in this way has some benefits. For one thing, the internet is not everywhere yet. Although wi-fi is now being slowly introduced on some airlines, many business travelers still need to be able to work on their files on the go and this still is not an option on all airlines yet. Then there are other jobs that take people “into the field” that also often involve working on documents when no internet connection is present. Without offline capabilities, a lot of work could come to a stop.

Another useful aspect of working offline is that you have the ability to work in your traditional “offline” office software, which is, at the moment, much more robust and feature-rich than its online counterparts. Suites like Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, StarOffice, and others let you to do a lot more than a free online service like Google Docs, though this may change in the future.

Until recently, the choice between web office suites and offline suites was an “either/or” choice; however, now, there are options available that give you the best of both worlds. Here are a few services and tools I’ve found, some of which are now just on the verge of launching, that promise to bring you the new “blended office suite”:

• DocSyncer: DocSyncer is a yet-to-launch service that syncs up your Microsoft Office documents with Google Docs. The screenshots look nice, so it’s worth signing up to see how it works out.
• OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs: This OpenOffice extension exports & imports your docs in and out of Google Docs. With this, you can upload OpenDocument Text (.odt), StarOffice (.sxw), Microsoft Word (.doc, but not MS XML), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods), Microsoft Excel (.xls), Comma Separated Value (.csv), & Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps) files into and out of Open Office.
• Microsoft Office Live: (Private beta) Your documents are online in the Microsoft Office Live workspace, but when you go to edit them, the editing is done in Microsoft Office software, which you have on your PC. Those edits are immediately reflected in the version on Office Live. Documents can also be shared with others who can comment on them or edit them and the different versions are tracked in the Office Live workspace.
• Zoho Writer + Google Gears: Zoho Writer lets you click a button to go offline. The first time you use the feature, you will be prompted to install Google Gears. After installation & a browser restart, click “Go Offline” again to make your documents (15 docs by default) available offline. When you’re offline, you can go to http://writer.zoho.com/offline to access and edit your files.
• ThinkFree, Premium Version: ThinkFree just announced that they will begin offering a premium version of their online office suite that offer users the ability to work offline. The premium edition will be $5-10/month and the free version will be rebranded as ThinkFree Online Basic Edition and supported by advertising. The private beta will begin in January, 2008 and the wider beta in February.

Do you need to work offline? If so, what software or services are you going use?

According to today’s blog post on the Official Gmail Blog, there is a new feature in Gmail: colored labels! With the ability to assign colors to different types of email, it’s easier to see, at a glance, what’s in your inbox. This is a feature that I find really useful in Outlook 2007, which I use heavily at work…it’s gotten to the point that a quick look at the colors in my inbox can tell me exactly what kind of day I’m going to have. And now, I’ll have that same ability in my Gmail! That is, if the feature would hurry up and appear already. I hate when I know a new feature is coming and I don’t have it yet. I tried logging out and back in, which apparently works for some, but no luck yet. I guess I will just have to wait.

Google Maps for your mobile phone is out now with a new, improved version called Google Maps with My Location (beta). The new version offers several new features, the most important being its ability find your location using either your phone’s built-in GPS or by triangulating your location using cell towers. If your phone doesn’t have GPS, the triangulation feature will get you somewhere within 500 to 5000 meters of where you really are. You can then use the “0″ on your phone to position yourself more accurately on the map. In addition to the “my location” feature, the new version of Google Maps for mobile also has real-time traffic (I could have used this today!), more detailed step-by-step directions, integrated search results, easily movable maps, and even satellite imagery. You can see a demo of the service here. Also, check out the video below for an explanation of how it all works. To get the latest version of Google Maps, point your mobile browser to www.google.com/gmm. Most web-enabled mobile phones are supported, including Java, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices.

There’s no Gphone. No shiny-screened iPhone killer. Instead, what Google announced today was a mobile platform. Code-named “Android” (huh??), the platform includes an operating system, user interface, and applications. A collective sigh from letdown bloggers shuddered through the blogosphere today. According to the Official Google Blog’s post on this, they think the platform they announced “is more significant and ambitious than a single phone,” which begs the question, “have they seen the iPhone?”

Sure, sure…the Google mobile platform was developed in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance, which includes 30 tech and mobile leaders like Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC and T-Mobile, which means the Google platform won’t be tied to any one device and you won’t have to switch carriers to use it. It makes sense. It fits with their goal of “providing access to information to users wherever they are,” as they say.

However, I wanted this:

Consumers won’t see the Google platform in action until the second half of 2008.

Rumor has it that this is the GoogleOS, but I think it’s just a skinned Windows XP. Still, I’d like to have that skin!