One of the primary concerns consumers have with keeping important documents in the cloud is the possibility for lack of access should the cloud go down. Some folks feel uncomfortable giving up control for having local backups of important files. Google understands those concerns and today announced the Convert, Zip and Download (CZ&D) feature available in Google Docs.

The CZ & D utility makes it a breeze to tag a batch of Google Docs for conversion to the desired format (MS Office, Open Office, PDF, etc.). The converted files are then zipped up into a single compressed file for downloading to the user’s computer.  I have been wishing for an easy way to grab my docs from the cloud, and this looks like a good way to do that.

UPDATED: I am a true geek, and as such in order to maintain my membership in this elite group I have to constantly noodle with my desktop. I can’t let it just sit there, I have to customize it the way I want. Here’s my Mac desktop as I am currently using it:

The customization involves the panel on the left side, produced mostly via the free Geektool utility. Geektool lets Mac users put virtually anything on the desktop, with live refreshing. I have (from top to bottom):

• Time
• Date
• Monthly calendar
• Accuweather stratus (not Geektool)
• Remember the Milk task list

All of the Geektool customizations refresh automatically at defined intervals in the background. The RTM task list is not interactive, it is just for reference. It is pulled from the RSS feed that RTM creates for each user. What do you think? You like?

WebWorkerDaily is a “must stop” site for me every day. Sure, I am a web worker, but I find they have so much good information for anybody who is online a lot. I was thrilled to see this morning that they have compiled some of their best articles concerning freelancing and working on the web, into an e-book for easy reading. The best part for me, apart from it being an e-book, is that Web Work 101: How to Escape the Cubicle is freely downloadable. It is in PDF format so anybody can use it. Go grab it and tell them that we sent you. Great work, WWD! I have been glued to the book since I grabbed it and not getting any work done. Don’t tell Kevin, he thinks I’ve been working all this time.

Many early reviews of Google Wave show it to be a noisy environment — waves of content and interaction crashing all around. I’ve kept my usage of it to a minimum by standing near the shore, so I haven’t experienced the riptides just yet. And no, I don’t have any invites to give just yet. Firefox users can better surf the waves with a free Google Wave Notifier extension, written by Chad Smith. Once installed, it monitors your Google Wave account for recent activity, displays the number of unread updates and takes you to them with a right-click. That should keep folks safer in the deep end of the wave pool.

(via Lifehacker)

This little screencast is a showcase of some of the utilities I use every day to make my life easier. In the video you’ll see:

• App for the milk- free desktop app for Remember The Milk
• Remember The Milk Gmail gadget
• SoundSource
• Pandora One desktop app
• MacJournal

I use Evernote on every mobile device I put my hands on. It is the information capture tool that helps me make sure nothing gets away from me. It also lets me access that information no matter what I might be doing, and put it to good use. I have missed using Evernote on the Android platform, but not any longer. There is a beta version of Evernote for Android that I have been testing, and you can too.

The Evernote beta is not in the Android Market, you’ll have to go to the Evernote forums and download it OTA. Once it’s installed you can capture information via the phone camera, record an audio note, enter a text note or even upload a file from the Android phone. The beta is not very full featured, that’s about all you can do with it. You can’t access your notes stored in the cloud either, so you can just capture info presently.

It’s good to see Evernote hit Android, but I hope they get a better version more in line with those on other platforms.

(via Lifehacker)

Need to edit spreadsheets on your iPhone? DataViz has added that ability to its newest version of Documents To Go for iPhone. Prior to this release, the productivity application only offered editing of Microsoft Word documents, but now Excel has been added to the editing mix. Data from editable cells appears at the top of the iPhone screen, above the spreadsheet. Aside from basic edits, DataViz also added support for 111 formulas, password protection, number and cell formatting, and multiple worksheets.

Documents To Go for iPhone is $9.99 in the iTunes store, but there’s a $14.99 version as well. For an extra $5, DataViz offers support for Microsoft Exchange attachments — both sending and receiving supported documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

I have been a fan of mind mapping for a long time. I like to use MindManager from Mindjet, especially in ink on a Tablet PC as I recently demonstrated. The ability to make quick maps on a more mobile device has been a long-time desire of mine, and I am happy to see from our friends at WebWorkerDaily that Mindjet for the iPhone is now available.

Don’t get me wrong, you’re not going to build sophisticated maps on the iPhone. The screen is just too small and tapping the keyboard is not that great. But there are times when I have ideas that contain the seed of a map, and these could be knocked out on the iPhone no problem. You can email maps or transfer them over Wi-Fi back to the PC for further work. Mindjet for the iPhone looks pretty full-featured for such a small app, and I can’t wait to try it. $7.99.

I’ve made it known how much I like using Evernote. It’s fitting that just a short while after showing why I like using Evernote the company let me know that a new version 3.5 has entered a public beta for Windows. It’s available today but they let me have access to it a couple of days early and I loaded it up on the ThinkPad x200. Let me tell you, I love this new version. It looks and works better, making using it more productive and dare I say it, fun. Rather than tell you the long list of improvements, here’s what the Evernote folks say about it:

Visible improvements

Three different ways to view your notes:

• Thumbnail view: Rendered thumbnails showing the contents of your notes, images, and PDFs for easy browsing and filtering
  • Can zoom thumbnails to see more detail
• List view: Multi-column “List View” with sorting on any column
• Mixed view: Mixed thumbnail + detail view
  • Can display thumbnail or mixed views in visual groupings by date, size, source URL domain, and start of title
  • Auto-zoom feature for thumbnail view allows you to see more notes at once
  • Faster viewing of single notes

Note editing:

• Auto-complete tagging and easier tag creation
• Spell checking as you type
• Better support for advanced markup
• Can now create tables within notes
• Can specify default font size for text in notes
• Better handling of longer text notes
• Creating ink notes in easier with new canvas-like layout
• Find and Find next/find previous (both within and across notes)
• Better consistency across the Mac and Windows versions of Evernote
• New icons and buttons
• More user-friendly “Folder Import” feature to automatically create notes from a watched folder–great for scanner and other integrations
• More functions available in single-note editor window:
• Detailed note information and attributes
• Emailing notes
• Printing notes
• Editable description of the search filter
• Ability to add or remove individual criteria from current search filter
• Can save the current search for use later as a Saved Search
• “View on Map” button opens geo-tagged notes in Google Maps
• Evernote for Windows introduction video included on launch
• Multi-lingual spell check included in application
• Quick access to your online account information
• Improved screen clipping requiring fewer steps, with on-screen explanations
• Menu options for attaching files to notes without requiring drag-and-drop
• Extend note search capabilities with ANY or ALL search criteria
• Remove tags from notes with a single click

Under the hood

• Advanced note text editor based on Google Chrome
• Improved synchronization performance via networking optimizations
• Improved database performance for faster searching and sorting of notes
• Single binary for all supported languages

As a tech writer, I read far more than I write. And most of my reading is through RSS feeds on a computer, be it a netbook or a notebook. I used to read feeds on smaller devices, but the experience was generally sub-par for me. The new NetNewsWire app for iPhone has changed that perception in a big way. I downloaded the free version of the app a few days ago and I’m totally enjoying it. I’m not keen on the advertisements in the free version, mainly because they take up a bit too much space when in landscape mode, so I’m dropping the $1.99 to get the ad-free version. The app is slated for a price increase to $4.99 in October, so hurry up and try the free version if you’re remotely interested.

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