Home Archive by category "ideas" (Page 3)

Category: ideas

Google Docs: Expand or Improve?

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Ionut Alex Chitu (Google Operating System) and Philipp Lenssen (Google Blogscoped) seem to agree with each other that Google Docs needs improvement. However, there are differences in the ways they each approach that improvement. For example, Ionut thinks Google should stop adding features and concentrate on improving the ones that are already there. Philipp — if I’m reading his post correctly — has an idea for “feature gadgets” — menu items scripted via a Docs API that can access selection, whole document, etc. and modify it in a way that implements an advanced feature that most people wouldn’t use. Unlike…

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Interesting Thoughts: People Ratings

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Brought to my attention by Google Blogoscoped, I think Reza Behforooz has an interesting idea in his post on Washington’s (the state, not the city in D.C.) recent legislation to have DUI drivers sport yellow license plates. I quote his thoughts and ideas: I love reputation based systems like eBay and wikipedia. It’s a good way to build trust and fight spam. I personally wish there was an easy way for people to have a publicly visible reputation that was influenced by anyone. Imagine a world where people could easily point their cell phone at you and give you a…

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Application Storage Architectures Are Important

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This quarter and next quarter, I’ll be taking music theory classes at school. We’re using a program called Musition, distributed by an Australian company by the name Rising Software. Initially when I set it up, it was using a local database of course material with a local data store of audio files and all the other accompanying stuff. A couple days ago, though, my teacher sent out instructions for connecting the program to the network, and it’s now 100 times slower. Previous load time was around five seconds. That was tolerable, especially considering what the program was loading. It also…

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Blogger Blogrolls and Bugfixes

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In the last couple days, Google’s Blogger team added a new sidebar widget to Blogger In Draft for testing. It’s a “Blog List”, in essence a blogroll. It displays a list of blogs, and optionally titles of each blog’s latest post, snippets of the latest post, and how long it’s been since each blog was updated. Users can add sites either manually or by importing from Google Reader subscriptions. In other news, a list of bugfixes and enhancements were added to mainstream Blogger, including fixes for the label counts bugs (which I have never suffered from, AFAIK) and comment pagination…

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Programming Game Show Idea

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My friend i80and had an interesting game show idea the other day. He thought of a show where contestants (probably two) are given a whiteboard, a marker, and a programming problem, and the person who designs the simplest and most efficient data structures for that situation wins. It gave me an idea, too. What if the show involved not just data structures, but entire class abstractions? Or perhaps actually writing code for a specified operation within the given situation? I think I need to give an example. Let’s say the show begins with the original idea of designing data structures.…

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