3 posts tagged “google”
I'll start by getting the obvious out of the way. I've been procrastinating, I should've been writing my UC Personal Statement (only 1/3 of the way there) but Google annoyingly redirected me to my "personalized" homepage instead of it's usual homepage and this is when I spotted the battleships widget. So blame Google I say.
Anyways, I might have stared at this tiny widget for too long but I've found two puzzles that I can't seem to solve:
So, I got upto this stage in puzzle 5 and am now stuck. In the third row up, I need to have 2 squares with a ship but have only one free. The blacks are what I'm given so I'm pretty sure that it's a destroyer on the far left and then to fulfill that 3, it needs to be a submarine at (6,2). Ships can be next to each other (including digaonally) hence all the X marks I'm able to fill in.
Things get more fun with the next one:
For me to fulfill the requirement of the 2 in the second row up, I need to put a submarine at (3,2). That means (3,0) and (4,0) become X. That means... Aah, whilst writing this post, I figured #7 out:
I think I need to stare at #5 some more.
Over the past few days, I've noticed that the Adsense on the bottom of blogs has been targetting me (from what I can tell, they seem to be showing ads based on the interests I specified in my profile). For example, I got these ads whilst browsing Snippey's Vox (where I doubt he blogs about India, Movable Type or Tablas)
I love this, in fact I've been far more tempted to click on these ads than I have the other 10-20 billion adsense ads out there. Nice work Team Vox!
On a whim, I signed up with Google Spreadsheets and was extremely surprised to find an invite waiting for me when I got back from my exam (talk about a reward!)
So my early impressions:
- It's like a basic Microsoft Excel, it does everything (as you'll see in the screenshots) from freezing panes to formulae but I haven't found a way to add graphs, write macros etc (which to me is the real strength of Excel)
- The auto-updating/recalculations of cells is very cool - at first I didn't expect it to do it.
- It is however excruciatingly slow - I won't give them too much grief with this point considering this looks like it is in an alpha (or perhaps pre-alpha) stage. As an example, however, a few times it took several seconds for a cell to become highlighted once clicked, sorting also took several seconds. What's even worse is a lot of the time a red updating bar (a la GMail) appears underneath the toolbar which is highly distracting. Also I got a 'connection lost' error a few times but that again is problem just an alpha bug.
- Uploading a spreadsheet from Excel was a piece of cake and it seemed for the most part to import everything correctly
- One feature I do find odd is they have a Merge Across button but you can't seem to vertically merge the cells (only horizontally)...
- I attempted to invite Jesse to play with me but for the moment you can only share the spreadsheet with other invitees - hence I think I haven't seen the selling point of this app.
- It doesn't support Safari but that looks to be the new trend - I mean Vox doesn't support it either ;)
For the moment, however, my thoughts can be summed up by the word 'meh'. It is a decidedly cool web app but as a spreadsheet... From the digg thread many are hoping this is the almighty Excel killer but I'm not really sure. From what I gather of the app and the intro pages, the killer feature here is the ability to share your spreadsheets, as a non-business/enterprise/corporate user, I rarely do this but I could see the use for it.
For now, if I ever need to use a spreadsheet, it'll be Excel - more feature rich, faster and I know where everything is in the app!
