Don’t kill Google because of some naughty 1″x1″ pictures. Let the teachers be responsible for enforcing school policy and turn on Safe Search. Instead, use Google for everything it offers beyond a pretty fine search engine.

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Want to create an online photo album or website about the field trip? How about take a survey that dumps data in a Google spreadsheet about kids’ favorite parts of the field trip? Create an online presentation and then interact live with digital pen pals while they watch the presentation? All possible for free with Google. 

The short of it all, you can’t do ALT-TAB between browser tabs. That means when once we could copy text from Excel, ALT-TAB and paste the text in Outlook, we can’t do the ALT-TAB trick to copy text from Google Apps and paste it in Gmail. That’s right, not even the superbrowser Chrome. Why didn’t the engineers think of it? I guess they don’t use web apps too much.

I am not sure if Michael tried the brilliant application shortcuts or lift a tab out of a window but for me it works like a charm. Alt-Tab brings me from a tab to a tab and Ctrl-Tab from an app to an app. Or did i get it wrong?

More on Nyman’s application:

GMDesk is an application that lets you run Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Maps as a stand-alone application to do all your mail handling, calendar event reading etc with. No need to open it up in a web browser, or have it clutter your workspace.

Fire up GMDesk, and just alt-tab (on Windows or Linux) or Cmd-tab (on Mac) to shift between this application and the other ones you are running.

GMDesk offers an easy menu as well as keyboard shortcuts to switch between different Google services, and you can specify what default service you want the application to start with. It also supports Google Apps access as well.

via: Lifehacker

Google Browser aimed at Web Apps

First of all: it is a speedy browser with the cleanest interface around. No big logos or branding:my whole screen is functional space. Second: The main reason it does this, is that it is focussed on web applications. Google is not interested in you using their browser per se. they want you to use their web apps as gmail and google docs. With chrome you can create short cuts directly to your apps on desktop or quick launch bar, with the websites icons instead of chrome’s. Where on my quicklaunch bar there used to be Microsoft Word, Outlook and Adobe Photoshop icons, there are now Google docs, Gmail and Splashup icons, and even in the task bar they will come up with the recognisable apps icon. I dont see Chrome as Windows Killer (see resources), but more a Windows Ignorer. You will still use windows and it basic functionality (or any OS, for that matter) but your main work interface will be Chrome run web apps. And google gears tackles the main web apps bug: you dont need to be online.