Online Application Review

I will start by saying “Google Docs rocks!” Until this assignment I never spent much time working with this suite of applications because I have Microsoft Office. Google Docs has advantages Office doesn’t. Probably the greatest advantage is that all files are online and can be accessed anywhere. While this is neat, it is pretty much what we Web 2.0 crowd take for advantage. Online storage aside, I’m blown away by the functionality these applications have for free! The spreadsheet application has all the features I use most frequently from Excel like speed fill and formulas. It also has really cool gadgets you can put on your spreadsheet to jazz it up. The word processor has what you would expect but more such as the innate ability to create PDF files and the ability to open PDFs and copy from them. This feature is very cool but you cannot directly edit PDFs yet. They’re working on that. The presentation software can embed video and animations and, the part I like best, can be embedded into websites. Some people would say that a big feature the Google Docs has is the ability to collaborate in real time. I personally do not do a lot of collaborating so it’s not a big deal to me. I did see that it will email you when someone you are collaborating with has made changes. I barely scratched the surface describing all the functionality of Google Docs. If you haven’t tried it out, you need to. If you were, like me, thinking you already have what you need because you have Office, you need to invest an hour or two checking Google Docs out. You just might convert. Oh yeah…for the record, I would recommend Google Docs to my district.

I like photo editing though I really don’t have time to do it much. I went ahead and played with Phixr, FotoFlexer and Picnic. I have a fair amount of experience with Adobe’s Photoshop so I was ready to be under whelmed and in some cases I was. Surprisingly to me, in some cases I was impressed.

Of the three photo editing sites I checked out, I rank Picnik the best followed closely by FotoFlexer. Both had very similar interfaces. So similar, in fact, that at first I thought I was the two were one. Once I started using them the differences became more clear. Both fix red-eye pretty well. I liked the way Picnik gave you a choice between fixing human and animal eyes. Apparently there is a difference however I didn’t happen to have a red-eyed animal photo to check it out with. Picnik worked faster on my machine and had lots of very nice effects. Unlike FotoFlexer, Picnik let you see a preview of the changes before you submitted them thus eliminating the need to find a back button. I was able to create a nice picture of my wife and son with a fuzzy circular mask around their faces that faded to black and white in no time. FotoFlexer has me save the pictures on their site by default where Picnic assumes you want to save on your local machine which I prefer. FotoFlexer is well worth checking out because of the extra artsy effects it allows you to add to your pictures.

I feel like I’m rambling on a bit here so let me cut to the chase about Phixr. It’s slow and doesn’t have near the functionality of the other two. Don’t bother going there. I would recommend FotoFlexer and Picnic to my school district. They’re fun.