Fun with Google

This is more of a how-to on getting the information you're interested in piped straight into your computer.

I assume all of you are using Google Reader. If not, it's by far the most efficient way to read blogs and surf websites. It's so awesome, it'll take over your life for a bit before you get it under control and tone it down. Instead of having to go out to each of your favorite websites to see if there's new content, Google Reader will collect it all in one convenient location, just like your email site (you ARE using Gmail, aren't you?). Granted, there are other newsreaders out there that do the same thing, but Google Reader is the best I've come across.

That's step one.

Step two is going to Google Blog Search.
What this allows you to do is type in a search term, say "Watchmen Movie", and the specialized search engine will turn up all blog postings that feature something to do with your search query. While this is cool in itself, they've added a neat new feature which allows you to subscribe to the search results as if it were a blog in itself. For example, I've now subscribed to the "Watchmen Movie" blog search results, and anytime anyone publishes something about the Watchmen movie, it will show up in my Google Reader, without me ever having to do another search! Too cool.

Obviously, this could get out of hand if you subscribe to a search result that is wildly popular ("Star Wars" or "Harry Potter" would get you hundreds of posts a day, I'm sure) but if you use standard search criteria to narrow down your selection, this should become a valuable resource for you.

Enjoy!

Photoshop Express has landed

In my continuing quest to be able to exist entirely online, using only online versions of software programs, I present to you what may be the first salvo in what ultimately ends the online image editing battle.

Photoshop Express.

Adobe Photoshop has long been the king of image editing software, but it comes at a price. Being a video producer, it's one of the essential programs in my toolbox. But for doing simple tasks, like cropping or making black and white, it's sometimes overkill.

Photoshop Express joins the ranks of Fotoflexer and Picnik in this newly developing war for free online image editing. At this stage, I still have to give Fotoflexer the big edge in overall usability, but being as it's Photoshop, I anticipate its functionality to increase exponentially over the coming weeks and months. But even in its stripped-down form right now, it's still got some cool functions. I especially like how when you select an effect or image adjustment, it shows you all the variations all at once. Makes finding the exact look you want blazingly fast.

Alas, there's no layer support yet.

But as I said, I'm sure it's on its way.

And like the other online image editing sites, Photoshop Express makes it easy to import or access photos from many popular image hosting sites, and Facebook. Handy.

Overall, a great first step, and one to watch.

Hulu.com - The Answer? Or just the next step?

HULU... it might not be THE competition to watching TV on actual TV, but it's close.

I'd signed up for the beta preview a couple of months back, but after looking at it for a few minutes, some other shiny thing commanded my attention and I forgot about it. It kinda came back on my radar with the well-publicized official public release (it must have been well-publicized because my non-techie wife came into my office asking if I'd heard about this new thing called Hulu). But a seemingly innocuous link to a video of Steve Carrell and Stephen Colbert from 1996's Dana Carvey Show that made me a believer.

In watching that video clip, and then realizing that the ENTIRE season of episodes of this long-sought-after show (by me) was available in high quality, and for free, that showed me the depth and scale of this new service.

Arrested Development - The ENTIRE series available for free.
SNL - All the skits individually accessible (so you only have to watch the good ones)
Simpsons, Family Guy, Office, 30 Rock, and dozens of others are also offering a growing number of episodes (although no complete seasons yet, but I expect that to change).

There's DOZENS of shows, from almost all broadcast and cable networks (although I don't think ABC or CBS are on board yet, but I'm hearing rumors that that will change soon). Literally too many to list or count. I found a show I hadn't seen since I was five years old and watched a part of an episode (I'm nostalgic, but not THAT nostalgic to sit through a whole episode).

They have entire sporting events, like game 4 from the 1977 Stanley Cup Finals (that's hockey to you non-sports fans).

They even have dozens of movies available available for free, many of them relatively prominent titles. As you might surmise from the image at the top of this post, I chose to watch "Man on the Moon" with Jim Carrey. (for my review, click here).
(I'm going to embed the video of the entire film here, but I don't know if you have to registered for it to show up. Please let me know what your experience with this embedded video is)



The quality of the film was good with two options for commercials. One where you could watch a 2 minute movie trailer before the film and have no commercials during the film, or another option where you get normal commercial breaks throughout the film (but these are only single 15-second long breaks every fifteen minutes or so.)

After about 40 minutes, my office chair began to get less and less comfortable to watch a full length film in and my butt fell asleep a few times. While you CAN watch a full-length movie at your desk, you probably don't want to. But for TV show episodes? No problem. And if you're on the road and have your laptop and an internet connection, Hulu makes the perfect entertainment destination.

I know that if I miss an episode of my favorite TV shows that I'm not out of luck, or that I have to scramble to find it or hope that someone has uploaded it to bittorrent or youtube.

Hulu is a great step forward. Now we just need the nerds that are working on the box that allows internet videos to be played on our TVs to step up their game. Come on, nerds, let's GO.

100% Online Experiment

A week ago or so, I rescued what looked like a broken laptop from a trash pile, intending to maybe use it for a prop for a commercial or film or something. It was a Dell Inspiron, about five years old. It had no power supply and was missing three keys on the keyboard. On a whim, I took the laptop to a Circuit City to see if they had something that could power it up, just to see if it worked at all. My intention was to perhaps hack it into a digital photo frame using one of the many cool tutorials available online.

I was pleasantly surprised when the laptop powered right up. I bought a universal power supply and brought my new toy home. All I had to do was bypass the password (easier than I thought it would be) and I was up and running. A wireless mouse/keyboard combo, and the missing keys problem was solved. It took me about an hour to completely wipe out all traces of the previous owners and I was ready to make this computer my own.

I was about to start installing MS Office, Adobe's Suite of products, Final Draft, etc, when an idea occurred to me. What if I didn't install ANY software on the computer and just used the the free online equivalents? Was it possible? Could I operate 100% online?

So far, the answer is YES. Granted, I can't do advanced video editing, vector drawing or really advanced photo editing (yet), but I can do everything else I'd want a typical computer to do. Here's what I'm using so far, and I'll update this list as I discover new products.

Google Docs- This is Google's online version of MS Office. It's not yet nearly as robust as MS Office, but it does a really good job of functioning as a sturdy word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program. Better yet, all of these Google Docs are sharable and embeddable and able to be worked on in a collaborative fashion. Plus, it saves all your work online and you can access from any computer that has internet access.

Gmail - A great web-only email solution. Gmail's been around for a few years now, but it's been over the last year or so that I've migrated from Outlook and Yahoo Mail as my primary mail sources over to Gmail. Gmail has added tons of great features lately, such as chat directly inside of Gmail, and there are a bunch of really useful add-ons.

Google Reader - This doesn't really have a good desktop equivalent, but it's something you should be aware of and using if you're not already. It's the best RSS newsreader I've come across. I love it.

Google Notebook - Great notebook/clippings service. Allows you to collect and organize anything you find on the net, specifically for doing research.

And lest you think it's all Google...

Zhura.com Screenwriting - Great online screenwriting program. It's still in its basic form, but I can see this becoming a serious challenger to Final Draft or Movie Magic, especially with it's online collaboration features and ability to store your documents online.

FotoFlexer - A basic imagine editing website. Connects directly to your Flikr, Facebook, Picassa, and a host of other places where you might have photos hanging out. It lets you do interesting effects, and sort of layers. But it's really only a placeholder program until Photoshop Express debuts sometime later this year (hopefully).

Adobe also has a simple video editing program called Premiere Express, but at the moment, it's really only useful for mashing up youtube videos. But I can see the potential for doing very basic editing down the line.

Those are the biggies at the moment. As I come across new problems, I'll be sure to catalog my trials and errors and solutions. We'll see if I can operate on a computer 100% online!

Zhura.com: Great (free) online Scriptwriting website

I found out about Zhura.com a few days ago from The Unknown Screenwriter's blog. As I'd just recently learned about Scripped.com from Alex Epstein's Complications Ensue blog and found it lacking, I was very curious to see if any version of an online scriptwriting software program could be viable.

Happily, I really like Zhura.com, and I'm planning on giving it a complete test-drive with a sitcom script I'm going to write with my brother (who's not a screenwriter and doesn't ever plan on buying or using Final Draft or Movie Magic). We've been tossing around this idea for a sitcom for about a year now, and Zhura.com, with it's great collaboration capabilities, will allow us to work on together (without having to involve exporting of pdfs and emailing notes).

So far, the technical people have been fantastic, responding to my suggestions and the glitches I've noticed. I look forward to seeing what they do with this.

They are competing with Scripped.com, which has since addressed some of the complaints users have had, such as auto-complete and typical tab/enter functions you find in most screenwriting programs. However, it still lags behind Zhura.com in features and ease of use. It'll be interesting to follow this battle. It'll be even more interesting to see what Final Draft and Movie Magic do to address these two challengers.