Christmas Letter from the cloud....

This weekend I got the annual job of the Christmas letter done and with a new wrinkle. 

I didn't use a single desktop application to generate the document or print it out.  Everything was done using "cloud apps".  

I started off writing the letter on my laptop at the kitchen table and since I figured that I would likely finish the layout and printing from the desktop, I used Google Docs to draft the letter.  I figured with Google Docs, it would be easy to retrieve on the desktop and finish it off.  Then the wife wanted to put some pictures in it.  

While the pics were on the desktop computer they were also all in my PicasaWeb account online.  Google Docs will let you insert images you upload from your local machine, or from a web site specifying the URL of the image or or from your PicasaWeb account.  There were half a dozen pictures the wife had picked out, but a couple of them needed a bit of work - cropping, tweaking the brightness and contrast, adjusting color balance, red eye correction and so on. I could have downloaded them and used Photoshop Elements, but since I had got caught up in this exercise of doing everything in "the cloud", I hopped over to Picnik, logged in to my free account and opened the images up in Picnik directly from PicasaWeb.  For these basic image tweaks, Picnik works really slick and I can get things done faster there than using a desktop app. And Picnik has the slickest tool for making "red-eye" correction, especially for the pics of the dogs where you are really dealing with "green-eye".  When I was done making the tweeks, I saved the images back to PicasaWeb so I could use them in the document. 

Inserting images in a Google Doc couldn't be easier.   Pick the image from the source and click "select".  Once in the doc, you can adjust the size of the image by dragging the corners in and out to the point you want.  One thing I was not able to do was wrap text around the image, something I swear Docs would let you do in an earlier version. 

Google Docs has a fair selection of fonts and layout control to make it something more than just a fancy text editor. It can easily handle most writing chores I have - both personal and business. 

I was going to just print the letter out from the desktop computer to the color inkjet printer.  But hey, since this was a "cloud project", I had the printer hooked up to the PogoPlug and used the PogoPlug's print option and printed everything from the laptop at the kitchen table. Worked like a charm.  I could have been at the local coffee joint and finished things off. 

The latest incarnation of Microsoft Word with its "ribbon" has me pulling my hair out trying to do the simplest tasks.  Google Docs has enough power to do almost all of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. If I need more, I usually start off in Docs and then export the file to something I can finish in the desktop app. But more and more, the sole app I have running is the Google Chrome browser and everything is done there. 

Posted via email from greg-c - on the go....