If you’re away from your desk often, then you know the pain of losing direct access to your Outlook calendar, a life line for many of us. How do you commit to new appointments or remind yourself of upcoming ones if your primary date book is back on the home PC? Other than using remote access software to bring up your home desktop, one new and novel way is a beta synchronization program from Google. It works with Google Calendar (www.google.com/calendar), and once you set up a Gmail account, you can go to dl.google.com/googlecalendarsync/GoogleCalendarSync_Installer.exe to download the memory resident program. Once installed, Google Calendar Sync will ask you to set up the main options. Syncing Outlook and Google Calendar in a two-way exchange means that any new appointments you make in one program will show up in the other, regardless of which program you made the change in. There are two one-way options that let you update only from one program to the other: from Google Calendar to Outlook, and from Outlook to Google Calendar.

Our favorite syncing trick is to use Google Calendar to synchronize the Outlook calendars on two PCs. For instance, if you have a laptop and a PC, both with Outlook, you can sync both of them to the same Google Calendar and use the Web service as an intermediary. Simply download Google Calendar Sync to the home PC, establish a two-way sync relationship between the two, and synchronize events to your Google Calendar. Then download Google Calendar Sync to your laptop and set it up the same way, with a two-way sync relationship. Now you will have a current copy of your home PC calendar on your laptop Outlook calendar. If both PCs are set up for two-way sync, then any new appointment you make on the laptop, the Google Calendar, or the home PC will show up on all three calendars. In the Google Sync options screen, you can play with the sync intervals to ensure the updates across the calendars are as up-to-date as you like.


Graphics Are A Picnik

If you want a taste of how advanced Web applications have become and how effectively they connect you to your social media universe, then take a “Picnik.” Picnik.com is among the most powerful Web apps we’ve seen. After starting an account, the main screen not only lets you pull in photos from your PC but also stream images from your Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, MySpace, Photobucket, and Web-Shots accounts. In other words, you can effectively keep the photo libraries from most social networks and photo sharing accounts organized in one place. In fact, you can even manage the images in most of your accounts from the Picnik interface. For instance, we connected our Picnik account to all of our accounts at various media sharing sites so that they become a series of tabs in the Photos section of Picnik. Clicking the little gear icon in the lower-right corner of any image gives you the option to delete it. This will also delete the image from the image’s host Web site.

The real power of Picnik comes through when you choose Edit as an option for one of these images. Picnik gives you a set of expected tools for cropping, exposure, etc. Drill down to the Advanced button under the Exposure editing tab to bring up a histogram of the image and granular tools for adjusting exposure in highlights and shadows. The Local Contrast option at the bottom of this toolset will increase contrast in areas with multicolored pixels, which can bring out detail in complex textures. This is the kind of control we see in medium-grade desktop applications.

Move to the Create tab in Picnik and try the Effects menu. If you click any effect, such as sepia toning or infrared, not only will the effect be applied, but there are one or more sliders that adjust the type or intensity of the effect. When you go to Save & Share and save the changes, the newly edited image is also saved to Flickr, Facebook, etc., but as a new file. The edited version will not overwrite the original. There are still some bugs in the saving mechanism, which didn’t always work reliably with all of the social networks, but in most cases, Picnik proved to be a remarkably powerful way to manage and edit our shared photos in one spot.


Workspace Open For Business

Microsoft has watched start-ups and archrival Google charge into the Web application space, and now Microsoft is making its move with a unique program, the Office Live Workspace. We played with the application before its general Beta release in March 2008 and came away appreciating its novel approach to Web services. Use the Internet Explorer 6 or 7 browser and go to workspace.office.live.com, where you’ll sign in with your Windows Live ID and create a virtual Workspace. Unfortunately, as of this writing, some features in Workspace are unavailable in Firefox, notably the integration with Office applications. Generally, the Web service works with existing Office file types (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) and gives you an online space where you can always access, share, and comment on files.

For instance, in the main screen, use the Add Document button to bring up a file browser in Windows and upload a document to Workspace. Once in the directory, you can mouse over the file and get options to view the file or share it. If you view it, the file will open in the main window and a Comment button will let you add comments. If you use the Share button, Workspace prompts you to send an invitation with a link to a friend. You designate each person you share the file with as an Editor (able to make changes in the document) or a Viewer who can only see and comment on the document.

Unlike other Web applications that let you edit in the browser window, Live Workspace can actually connect to your Office applications. First, you have to click the tab labeled Install Office Add-in. This downloadable executable file will hook Workspace into all of your Office applications. In Word, for instance, you will see a new toolbar to open a file directly from the online Workspace (assuming you have an Internet connection, of course) and also save a file to the Workspace. And from within the online Workspace itself, a mouse-over option lets you open the online file in an Office application.

At this early stage, it’s hard to tell whether a fully Web-based approach to applications will carry the market forward or whether users will embrace Microsoft’s hybrid solution. Clearly, however, our desktop applications, like everything else about our work life, is about to be transformed by connectivity.

by Steve Smith