Friday, May 7, 2010

Google Feature Idea / Request

There is one additional feature Google could offer, which would make my - and I guess many other people's - online lives so much easier.

When working with the internet, quite often I need to take a screenshot or print a page for my records. A good example is when searching for a job, I need to keep track of the original offer I see, so I can recall it later when it comes to an interview.

How do you do that today? Well, capture with print screen, grabber tools (i.e. screenGrab! or ScrapBook as firefox extensions) or I print it into a pdf with CutePDF Writer. Exellent tools, btw!

And then I have to upload some of these manually to Google Docs. If Google could offer a screengraber tool and a pdf capture tool which lets me store the documents either online in my Google Docs account and on my computer, this would be a very strong argument for using Google Docs and not my local office package.

Just two little buttons in Chrome would do it: "Grab screen as jpg" and "Print page as PDF" and than a selector where to store. Does not even sound very difficult to implement, what do you think?

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Google Navigation and Microsoft Bing



Finally!

Google seems to have realized, that some color and a decent menu might actually increase usability! First the options in the left menu are hidden, on this picture they are shown. And under this Google shows some filter for images, being in image search right now.

While many of these filters and categories where available since quite some time, I appreciate the ease of use - quite similar to Bing. (Yes, I think Bing was better for some time in these aspects.)

But take a closer look at the left menu: filter by picture type (any, face, photo, clipart, line drawing) and the color selection. This is SO AWESOME! I have seen color and shape selectors beforehand for flickr.com, so this is not too advanced, but for image searches this is extremely helpful!

I guess the next step are shapes, and after that I hope to be able to text search these options: search for "oval face green background" or "face andreas.wpv" or "circle drawing picasso".

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