As Google Docs slowly begins to take form as a legitimate office replacement, there are still a few glaring feature absences. One of those is the inability to add custom-formatted page numbers or dates to your documents.
If you don't mind rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands a little dirty, Google Operating System tells us how to add page numbers and other information to your document's header or footer. This involves a little HTML editing, so consider yourself warned.
Note: If you simply want page numbers added to your Google Doc, and you don't need to customize them by adding color, size, or scheme, then you're better off exporting the document as a PDF and selecting the bullet that adds page numbers to your document. In other words, the following method is useful only if you want more customization than Google Docs by default provides.
In order to add a header that displays, for example, "Page (current page number) of (total number of pages)", open your Google Doc, click on "Edit HTML" (right next to the Revisions tab), and add this code at the very beginning of the code:
<div style="text-align: right;" class="google_header">Page <span class="google_pagenumber">1</span> of <span class="google_pagecount">1</span></div>
To add the same information to the footer, add this code to the bottom of the document:
<div style="text-align: right;" class="google_footer" id="google_footer">Page <span class="google_pagenumber">1</span> of <span class="google_pagecount">1</span></div>
Now that the code is in, you can customize it any way you desire.
Simkl is a web service that saves your instant message history to its servers so that you can access that searchable history from any computer with Internet access. You'll need a Simkl account and some money (1 month of archiving is $2.99 and one year is $24.99). You'll also have to change a setting in your IM client to use Simkl as a proxy (so that it can save your messages).
If the thought of a third party (besides the actual service provider) archiving your instant messages doesn't bother you, you can try out the service for a week for free. The history viewer is web-based, and you can do full-text searches on your IM history.
Simkl supports most of the popular IM clients including Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Pidgin, iChat, ICQ, Trillian, and Adium. Keep in mind that many of these IM clients like Pidgin and Trillian can log your chats individually, but if you use multiple computers with different IM clients, Simkl can unify your IM logging.
Online office suites are gaining some serious steam, and Zoho Office (along with Google Docs) remains one of the innovators in the market. Today, Zoho has released an update to Zoho Writer, their online word processing application.
The biggest highlight of the update is the added support for Microsoft's OOXML file format, mercifully titled DocX. In case you didn't know, whenever you save a Word document, PowerPoint file, Excel spreadsheet, etc...in Office 2007 (or 2008 on a Mac), the default format is DocX.
Zoho Writer now allows you to export your documents as a DocX file – though it looks like importing a DocX file is still a short time away.
Other notable feature updates include:
Thesaurus (available in ten languages)
Groups: Share documents with multiple people without having to enter in multiple email addresses each time you share a document.
Enhanced support for endnotes, footnotes, headers, and footers.
It looks like the line between online word processing and desktop word processing just got a little thinner. How about you, constant reader? Have you made the leap to online word processing? Sound off below.
Looking for a powerful text editor for all your writing and coding needs? Look no further than TotalEdit 4.1, a multi-featured text editing tool created by Independence Software.
TotalEdit offers a wealth of programming features, including syntax-coloring, code-folding, line-numbering, and many other hyphenated features. TotalEdit also includes a number of one-click edits, so you can quickly switch upper case to lower case or swap tabs to spaces.
And yes, for those of us who never even placed in our school spelling bee, there is a spell checker.
The newly released version 4.1 adds the ability to install TotalEdit on a portable USB key for use across multiple machines and cleans up some character rendering bugs. To open TotalEdit from the USB key, simply double-click on TEditStd.exe, and away you go.
Total Edit 4.1 is free, as in air, and Windows only.
MacVim is a port of the popular open-source text editor Vim for Mac OS X. It supports tabs, full-screen editing, and transparent backgrounds. The toolbar is also helpful as it provides easy access to save files, run vim scripts, make a project, save/load sessions, and undo editing.
MacVim also has handy syntax highlighting to make editing/reading text files easier on the eyes. If you need to edit remote files, you can use the --remote switch.
Vim is basically an enhanced version of the vi editor that comes on UNIX systems. If you'd like a quick lesson on vi/vim syntax, check out this University of Hawaii tutorial.
In this day and age, who has time for reading? You don't -- obviously. There's this site out there called PimpMyNews and it reads blogs aloud for you using text-to-speech software. You can even listen to the stories on an iPhone or iPod Touch through the site, and the service will even let you transfer stories onto your regular ol' iPod.
Despite being perfect for those too busy (lazy?) to read blogs, the site could also work in favor of the blind and others unable to read regular text. And for the skeptics: the text-to-speech software does a surprisingly decent job at being very understandable and comfortable enough to listen to, but others may be annoyed by the non-human elements in the the voice.
You know how it is, you're animated, have a point but inevitably even though you can't wait to say it, brain fog creeps in and you forgot your factoid. Don't you hate that? It's on the tip of your tongue, and you do remember it, but just not when you really need to access it.
AskMeNow is a text service where you type in 27563 on your mobile (which translates to ASKME) and then type in a question like "Who won the World Series in 1908?" and it texts you back an SMS answer. (Chicago Cubs). Like many q&a sites, such as Yahoo Answers, Ask Metafilter, Fluther, etc., that rely on the online community for answers, AskMeNow differentiates itself by using algorithms to provide answers to mobile users.
Besides providing answers to your most pressing questions, you can also download AskMeNow's web based mobile app directly onto your mobile device. From there you can access information such as the following:
AskTheOperator - 411 Search
Directions & Maps
Reuters News Feeds
Stock Quotes
Local Weather Forecasts
Horoscopes
Movie Times
Flight Information
Hotel Availabilities
While there is no charge from AskMeNow, standard messaging and data fees do apply from the various carriers. AskMeNow is headquartered in Irvine, CA.
First, a little experiment. What are the first three applications you think of when someone mentions text editors?
If you can only answer Notepad, Notepad and Notepad, there's help for you yet.
True, the ubiquitous Notepad is a text editor. People who regularly use text editors often find Notepad quite limiting. That's why there are so many alternative text editors available for Windows.
Linux text editors are a different breed, more closely akin to the uber-editors that you can add to Windows (in fact, many Linux-based text editors have been ported to Windows and OS X). Sure, you can use them exactly the same way you use Notepad, if you want. But you can do so much more: programming in languages from C to XML, annotating documents with notes, and even collaborative editing.
Judging by the large number of substitutes for Windows Notepad, people must have had issues with Microsoft's text utility since day one. This comes to no surprise as Notepad was built with a number of limitations like maximum file sizes, and minimal ability to format text.
Akelpad, like many of the other Notepad substitutes out there, seeks to improve on Notepad while staying true to its sense of minimalism. Still lightweight, but with more flexibility and less limitations, it can handle the basics - and with a few plugins it can handle even more - syntax highlighting, auto completion, sessions, and quick search, to name a few functions.
However, for the power user, Akelpad may not have all the features you might want. Other Notepad replacements such as Notepad++, Notepad2, and TED Notepad have other strengths, especially in terms of coding and other applications.
As with many other things in life, the kind of text editor one uses is a very subjective area. If you're in the market for a quality Notepad replacement, AkelPad is no slacker - but sampling a variety of editors may help find what works best for you - and is supposedly recommended by psychologists as a great way to spend an evening for stress relief (dinner and a text file anyone?).
Life's getting mobile, and it seems that's the way it's always going to be. Humans don't come off as the traveling type, yet we do. From horse carriages to cell phones, we're always looking for ways to do more on the move, so what's missing from your mobile life in 2008 and how can you fix it? The following list may help.
1. Full access to YouTube in Windows Mobile: Everyone's got a solution for playing YouTube Mobile videos on a Windows Mobile phone, but it seems no one's giving Windows Mobile users a way to access YouTube.com's full, flash video library. Oh wait, there is a solution. It only requires users to install a specific version of TCPMP and the Flash Video Bundle, an add-on to TCPMP to give it the ability to play flash video. Use Pocket IE to navigate to YouTube (a few other flash video sites are also supported). Clicking on a video will open TCPMP to play it. Easy, right?
You could also install Orb on your PC and use the Orb mobile client to find YouTube videos on the go, but that solution requires you to leave your home PC on all the time.
Search service ChaCha, which we've covered before, has launched a major new feature. You've always been able to ask questions via their website or IM and get answers from their "live experts". However, now they've added a whole new way to get instant answers - via SMS.
The free service is set to launch today, January 3. Jump in by sending a text to "242242" which cleverly spells out ChaCha on your numeric keypad. To test it out, we tried to find the phone number to a great beer pub in Portland Oregon. The response was quick informative, as you can see above.
Additionally, we tried a few other tests asking for directions and local weather conditions. Again ChaCha nailed it every time.
We're excited to see such an informative service hit SMS. We're not sure how they'll monetize this service (probably with subscription fees), but so far it is very useful.
Though it may seem like everything has an RSS feed nowadays, lots of sites still lack the feature, leaving RSS fiends with no option but to actually surf the web (blasphemous!). Fortunately, there's Dapper: The Data Mapper, a web service that will take information from a site and package it in the form of your choice (RSS feeds, Google Maps, iCalendar, and more).
In order to create a "Dapp," or Dapper app, navigate to the Dapper site and click on "create a new Dapp." The next few steps are very interesting, requiring users to answer a variety of questions regarding the source of information. The answers will depend on the format you choose and the information you'd like to collect. Options include RSS, Dapp XML, Google Gadget and others. The process of creating a Dapp should be pretty easy if the user understands the concept of RSS.
It may seem like RSS feed creation is the most obvious function of the service, but it's in the more complex stuff that Dapper shines. You can, for example, have the latest YouTube search results for a given keyword appear in your iCalendar daily. The possibilities certainly aren't endless, but there are a lot of them.
Want to make it easier for visitors to your web page to fill out text boxes without fear of spelling mistakes? Spellify is a versatile spell checking solution that lets users spell check text boxes on your web sites .
The users just type the words/sentence they want to be spell-checked and if there's an error, out pops a small dialogue box with proper spelling-suggestions. Password fields are automatically ignored. You can also specify Spellify to ignore special text fields if you want to. There is no need to press the "Go" or "Check" button or nothing.
The current version of Spellify is compatible with most of the front running browsers in the market including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
At first, it sounds like a texting nightmare from hell, but RSS via SMS has a place in our world through Web-Alerts, a small web experiment that may get lost in the vast internet desert that is web 2.0 failures. The service sends you a text message for every update to a chosen site's RSS feed.
The service is simple and easy to use. When you first visit the site, it'll ask your to enter a web address. If it finds an RSS feed for your chosen site, it'll ask you to enter your cell phone number. Should any updates happen to your chosen feed, a preview of the update will be forwarded to your phone. Removing a subscription is easy enough. "Just open the link in your text message and choose 'My Alerts' to remove any alert you are subscribed to." Furthermore, you can enter a keyword with your phone number so that you'll only be forwarded updates via SMS when they contain the keyword.
This could be extremely useful for someone closely watching a specific topic such as a stock broker. It could also become extremely annoying if you find yourself answering your phone every ten minutes to stop the latest SMS from incessantly vibrating in your pocket. Our advice: use wisely.
Springnote is a powerful browser based note taking system. You can forget about the standard text only inputs that many online note tools offer, this application has the ability to drop in images, attach files and organize layout at will. Its wiki style note taking system allows pages of content like todo's, monthly calendars and plans to be created with Word like functionality and tools with tags, change history, folder hierarchy and page bookmarks for more important content. Springnote's can also be shared between friends for reading or collaboration.
Perhaps the most important feature of Springnote is the ability to import and export notes. Downloading options include HTML, XHTML and Send to a Blog or use anywhere else. Importing can be done using MS-word docs, .txt, HTML or OpenDocument .odt formats. Springnote has an open API and unlimited storage of text files with 2GB file storage available. There are tons of Springnote mashups that you can utilize to expand the functionality of your account, including IM, Flickr, and Firefox toolbar integration.
As Google Docs slowly begins to take form as a legitimate office replacement, there are still a few glaring feature absences. One of those is the inability to add custom-formatted page numbers or dates to your documents. 
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First, a little experiment. What are the first three applications you think of when someone mentions text editors? 
