Online Documents Program Review
docs.google.com

For this assignment we’ve been asked to use a free document program and I choose Google Documents. I’m actually writing this review on it. I choose Google docs because I love Google as a tool and thought I would love anything with the word in it as well. I’ve used Open Office before and this looks to be similar except for being shared out over the Internet rather than downloading it.  A nice feature if you are always connected but for me that’s not always the case.  I looked around to see if there was a way to download it.  I don’t really see it.  I know the worlds getting more connected but we aren’t totally there yet.  The functionality seems to be easy to use with most of the basic features of office that a user would use.  For example you can insert an image pretty easy with out searching around.  This blog wouldn't let me copy it over except for one photo though for some reason. I had to go back and edit them back in.

It seems to be missing a lot of the advanced functionality that would prevent it from being used in a corporate setting.  At previous jobs I’ve had to use macros, document templates, and weird formats and this just doesn’t really have that.  It would be great for students looking to do simple word processing or write reports however.  I could see it saving on a school budget from having to purchase licensed copies of office for each computer in its labs except for that Microsoft already offers the student editions for almost nothing.

A couple of other perks i just noticed, it autosaves almost instantly which is great if you have toddlers trying to shut your laptop (like my angels above). Also you can save the document on to your computer but its not as straight forward as Microsoft Word.  You have to download it and choose what type of document format to do so in.  Anyone know what a ODT is?

As a side note, I did click on Zoho to see what it was. It seems a bit more complex as you have to create an account but I was amazed by the depth of tools it offered.  You can pretty much do anything document or data related that you could ever hope for.


Photo Program
www.Phixr.com

First off I tried FotoFlexer and just got an IO error on every picture I tried uploading. Next I choose to use Phixr and uploaded a picture of my little girls.   It was pretty neat seeing all the fun things you could do with it.

I even uploaded a few to my Facebook page after I got done playing with them.  I’ve seen people do some neat things with Photoshop but for the average user this site would be perfectly acceptable.  It would save on the 150$ or so that Photoshop costs.  I could see using this program to make silly photos of each of my students for cubby ID’s or our daily chores chart.


Once again this program is limited by Internet availability.  You can’t download it and then work on a batch of photos at a time.  Since my home computer is a laptop I like to move around with it a bit.  I visited my father this weekend for father’s day and had to do with out Internet for a while. This is a drawback for programs like this. You can’t argue with the free price tag though.