Tim Yang’s Blog

I’ve been playing around with Zohoplanner and I think I’m going to be using it more often to get things organised. It is an online interface that lets you create todo lists and make notes. There are a few things that I hope they will add later like a wiki like Schtuff.com has. (I love wikis. They’re just so easy to use and my MoinX desktop wiki has taken over as my favourite desktop publishing interface.) Zohoplanner also allows people to view your lists and notes, but it doesn’t have RSS feeds for updates.

This is a really nifty lifehack I found via Tipmonkies. Work Magazine has created an Excel spreadsheet that lets you sneakily check out jobs databases at work from an interface that looks like, no actually it IS, an Excel spreadsheet.

It’s a real Excel 2000 spreadsheet that plugs into Indeed.com’s search engine to make your job search look like actual work. So you type in your search keywords, the city you’re looking in, and the number of results you want, and it gives you what, to the untrained eye, is just more spreadsheet drudgery.

You can download the latest version of the spreadsheet here. Works well if you’re an accountant or a lawyer, but what if you’re a … web designer. “Oh this? Uh, it’s my daughter’s homework… yeah that’s it! Just helping her calculate the level of employment of web designers… in, uh, Congo?”

Online word processing holds a particular interest for me. To think that whatever I had to do with a desktop application, I can now do within my browser is a clear sign of progress into Web 2.0. The new GOffice is a good example of this. After you set up an account on it, you can word process a document on an interface similar to Microsoft Word’s (which I think must be using Fckeditor or something similar since it can output the document as HTML) and save it as a PDF file. You can also upload your own letterheads in graphic files for customised outputs. In the future, Goffice says they’ll support spreadsheets and presentations too.

Your documents are saved in your account on Goffice, but nothing on the site suggests how much space you can use. I don’t think the owners of Goffice are too fussed over that since word processed documents by and large don’t take up much space. Goffice has a decent business plan — it partners with Amazon for hard copy print-outs and sells subscriptions for commercial use. So I don’t think they’ll go out of business.

http://goffice.com/