Web Apps

Scheduling a time is an art! Every time I go back and forth over email to settle on a meeting time, I wish I could just send my calendar to the other person so they can pick a slot that works. Clean and simple! I kept thinking that the powerful Google should have a feature like this. Sure enough, after some research, I found that Google Calendar lets you share your calendar with anyone as a URL. All your events are anonymized as “Busy,” so the other person can only see that you’re occupied during that time, but can’t learn any details about the event (content, time, participants, and so on). ...

Pocket was formerly known as Read It Later. It has extensions for Chrome and Firefox that let you save articles you don’t have time to read to its database, so you can read them later when you’re free. Its reading app is available for iOS and Android, and it supports offline reading. You can also add tags to articles to make them easier to find later. Many RSS apps also support saving articles to Pocket, and that’s my favorite feature. The reason I gave up on Evernote was that many mobile news reader apps don’t support Evernote. If I came across a good article, I had to use a computer to save it to Evernote. Pocket is different: popular reading apps like Flipboard and Feedly all support saving directly to Pocket. If you’re reading in a mobile browser and want to save an article, that’s easy too. Just send it through Email. Pocket also helps you make good use of your time. I often come across good articles online while I’m coding or busy with something else, so I can’t read them right away. That’s when I save the article to Pocket, then take out my phone and read it when I have some free time. It also supports offline reading, and you just need to sync the content every so often. Evernote, by contrast, requires a paid plan for offline reading. For now, I put temporary articles in Pocket, and articles I want to keep permanently or study notes go into Evernote. ...

Like many people, I’m used to handling documents and reports in Google Docs, and over time it piles up a lot of material. So what if one day you want to back up all your Google Docs files to your computer? Google Docs doesn’t offer an export service, only downloads. If you have just a few files, you can download them one by one, but if you have a lot, it gets to be a real hassle. Here I recommend a program called GDocBackup. ...

I have a habit: every new year, I back up all my data, so I won’t regret it if my computer ever breaks and all my files disappear. Google Takeout, which I’m introducing today, is a backup service provided by Google. You can download the backed-up files to your own computer. Most importantly, since it’s a service provided by Google itself, you don’t have to worry about your account data falling into third-party hands! ...

Unfriend Finder is a Chrome-only extension that lets you find out which people have secretly removed you from their Facebook friends. Some people don't care about this kind of thing, but someone like me really does care! (I care a lot, but I still really want to know who unfriended me...) We were already friends, so why remove me :(( But then again, if you haven't installed Unfriend Finder, you won't know when someone unfriends you, so maybe that makes you feel a little better... ...

A few days ago, Google Dictionary was shut down without warning, and a lot of people panicked. We had all gotten used to looking up unfamiliar words on Google Dictionary whenever we came across them. Google said the dictionary’s features had been merged into Google Search and Google Translate, so the dictionary had completed its phased mission and it was time to say goodbye~ ...

Today I’m sharing a neat trick: writing notes directly on Twitter. I got the idea from Plurk. Lots of people like to reply “note” to Plurk posts when they come across gossip or news, so I started wondering whether notes and microblogging could be combined. After looking into it, I found that they can! The well-known Evernote offers a similar feature. Just follow its official Twitter account, and it checks your tweets and does the note-taking for you. Even if you don’t use Twitter, that’s fine. Several sites, including Facebook and Plurk, can sync their content to Twitter! ...

Google has tried to beat Facebook before with Buzz and Google Wave. I remember they got slammed by netizens. Google Buzz in particular was so bad I didn’t want to use it at all. Google Wave, on the other hand, I thought had real potential, but its weakness was that it had too few users, and it couldn’t connect with MSN or other instant messengers. The most important thing for an instant messenger is having lots of users. But this post isn’t about those two. It’s about Google+. ...

Sometimes you may want to share some code with a friend and ask them to help you debug it. In that case, sending the file directly is the best way. But what if they can’t receive files? That’s when Pastie comes in handy. You paste your code into Pastie, and the site gives you a URL. Just send that URL to the other person, and they can see your code. There are a lot of sites like Pastie these days, but Pastie’s biggest feature is that it can be embedded in external websites~ ...

For a long time I’ve wanted to make an online business card with some of my info on it, like my email, contact details, education, birthday, and so on. But I never had time to build a site like that. Then I came across the “Google Profile” feature online, which was pretty close to what I had in mind. The “Google Profile” feature we’re introducing in this post is actually a lot like Facebook’s “Info” section. It shows some of your personal details, such as education, occupation, birthday, gender, photo albums, email, and so on. My approach is to print the URL of my online business card on my physical business card, which reduces how much information I have to fit on the physical card. ...