I make no bones about my love for Google’s online application suite, from Gmail to Docs, I love ‘em all. But yesterday, Gmail added a feature that really just stunned me and I cannot get enough of. It’s the “Create a document from this email message” option from Google Labs. It’s pretty simple - if you’re reading a message and decide you would like it turned into a Google Doc, you just hit the little link that says “Create a Document” and Gmail copies it into a Google Doc. 

Why would you use this? Here’s how I use it - 

I have some clients who will create content for their Web sites or newsletters and they create it as an email message, rather than sending it along to me as a document file for editing. In the past, this meant opening Word, copying their text into it, gutting all the weird cross-app formatting, then getting to work. With the Gmail feature, with once click, that’s all done for me. When I’m done editing, I can invite the client to collaborate on the new doc via Google Docs, or save it as a Word document and fling it over to them. 

I must admit, when I heard about the feature, I thought “Why would I use this?” but then, after getting four emails like the one I just mentioned, and zipping through the process in about 1/2 the time it normally takes me, thanks to this feature, I’m sold. 

A good walkthrough of how to enable this feature (with pretty pictures) is over at Decoding the Web (http://tinyurl.com/4t4nhz).

Oh, and one other cool feature worth a serious mention - you can now view PDF’s right in Gmail, no external reader needed.  It’s a Google Apps Holiday Party in my world!

P.S. - one quick trick I’ve learned. If you’re going to edit in Google Docs, but then export it to Word for sending to someone, sometimes the line spacing will be really odd. To be safe, after you edit the Google Doc, do a SELECT ALL on the text, then hit EDIT and set the LINE SPACING to “Single” or your preferred setting. Otherwise, you get what looks like triple-spacing between paragraphs. Remember to save the doc after doing this, then export it.

Today is the big day, when Microsoft pulls the plug on Foldershare, the awesome PC peer-2-peer file/folder syncing service they bought a year or so ago. it’s been prettified and re-branded as “Windows Live Sync”, and well, the launch has not gone well for me and my clients.

You see, with this new version, Microsoft has said “too bad” to whatever ID you were using as your Foldershare login in the past, and now requires you use a Windows Live ID. Fair enough, it’s their product. The problem? With a new ID, comes a whole slew of syncing issues - the main being, it’s a new ID, so you lose all the “syncs” you set up, which is pretty close to disastrous for me, as I have many, many synced folders set up with clients. I do this for clients who don’t want to bother with having an in-house server, or just love the instantly updated access to files as we edit them. But now, I just lost all that access.

It’s typically a simple process to add a sync folder - you just choose the folder to sync, and send invites to everyone’s IDs. Problem? We all have to get new IDs, tell one another what they are, decide who’s going to manage all this sync re-creation, and spend days getting back in sync. Right now, I have some clients traveling, so they don’t have time to do all this, and so I can’t edit any documents in the shares, otherwise, it’ll be an out-of-sync nighmare fest.

At this point, I may be done with Foldershare. It’s always been a touch flaky, but now that I have a chance to “zero out” the whole thing, I think it might be time to try something else, as I know there are a few alternatives out there.

- Sugarsync (www.sugarsync.com): This is a fantastic paid service and I use it for my own activities, but haven’t asked clients to check it out yet, since they were already on Foldershare. The advantages of Sugarsync are many, including:

• *Easy* web-based access to your files
• A “Magic Briefcase” for on-the-fly access to files
• A wonderfully executed iPhone app that lets you share files and folders easily with others via emailed links
• An online backup of all your files. So if someone blows out a synced folder by deleting it, you can still go online and retrieve those files
• A great online and client interface that works like its own little filesystem for easy file management

SugarSync’s premium service is $5/month, but well worth it for 30GB of online backup, and unlimited syncing. It gets pricier for more space, but it’s well worth it (cost of doing biz, and all that!). And since it’s time to get your year-end tax deductions in, might be a good time to jump on the service.

BeInSync (www.beinsync.com)- I have to admit, i tried BeInSync a year or so ago, and found it pretty counter-intuitive. But they’re still around and claim over 4 million users, so they must be doing something right!

Google Docs, ThinkFree Office and Zoho Docs - if you’re just sharing office-type files (documents and spreadsheets), these are very solid options. They all have very powerful online editors (Thinkfree’s the best one, Google Docs is a close second) so you can easily edit a document, and every single revision is tracked and reversible.

NomaDesk (www.nomadesk.com) - I have been checking out Nomadesk for the past few weeks, and have been suitably impressed, even with the few bugs I’ve hit upon. NomaDesk eschews peer-2-peer sharing and instead gives you a “Virtual Fileserver” out in the cloud. After installing the client, you create folders on your virtual server, and assign them to virtual drives (which show up in “My Computer”) on your PC. From then on, it’s just like being on a corporate network with easy fileserver access. If you update a file on the virtual fileserver, it’s immediately updated. There’s no lag like with the peer-2-peer apps that must sync everyone on the network up with one another.  I found Nomadesk easy to use and understand, though it seems better for a small-volume user (not someone who likes to throw 30GB around the cloud all the time, like some of my clients)

There you have it, several alternatives to the freshly broken Foldershare / Windows Live Sync.

A quick follow-up - This morning, after fighting through Windows Live Sync’s inability to simply even log on, I suggested Sugarsync to a key client. Within an hour, everyone in the office had installed it and had it running, with comments along the lines of “Amazing” “Fantastic” and “We should definitely use this.” I guess I won’t have to bother with Live Sync now.

If you’re like me (and probably Ted) and are a bit of a social media junkie, at some point you may have tried out the Web browser named Flock. I remember trying it out when it first was released and it was more of a Flickr browser. I thought, “Cool” then promptly used it once and forgot about it.

Now Flock is at version 2.02 and I recently downloaded it to try it out and I’m incredibly impressed. For those of us who use Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, YouTube, Twitter, etc. on a regular basis, this is a godsend. Prior to using flock, my usual morning ritual was to open up Google Chrome and fire up Gmail, Facebook, Flickr, DeviantArt, Twitter and iGoogle tabs. These pretty much stayed open all day. Firefox is my “regular” browser so I’d open that up as well and surf with it. With Flock, I can have a sidebar open with Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and a Gmail checker running and not taking up “tab space.” You can configure a ton of social media services to run in that sidebar. Also, since I’m a photographer and use Flickr a ton, I love that I can have Flickr streams open in a top “media streams” bar at all times.

They’ve really done a lot to improve flock, including the addition of a built in blog editor as well. If you gave Flock a spin a while back and didn’t think it was right for you, I’d encourage you to give it a try now - especially if you’re a social media whore like myself!

This weekend’s a big one for me, I’ve been cleaning out anything and everything in the home office. As I was dumping out piles and piles of CDs and DVDs containging drivers, games, videos, archived data and more, I figured I needed a better way to store all this. Rather than buy yet another binder to store them all in, I’m going a different route - archiving them all to ISO format on a big external HDD. So long as they aren’t copy protected, it’s easy enough to do -

1 - Grab a copy of LC ISO Creator (it’s free and easy). There are dozens of other freebie ISO makers, I just like this one for ease of use.

2- Get yourself a big external (or internal) HDD and create an ISO folder on it. Remember that DVD ISO’s can be up to 4GB, so prep a drive with tons of room.

3. Pop the disc into your drive, fire up ISO Creator and follow the steps (with LC, there’s only two steps!) to generate an ISO.

The ISO will be a single file that’s like a photograph of the discs contents. It contains all the data from the disc, laid out exactly like the disc was. But, to access that data later, you’ll need a program to “mount” the ISO as a virtual CD/DVD drive. I’m partial to Virtual Clone Drive from Slysoft, which is again free and easy to use. You just double click an ISO file, and your PC will treat it just like a CD/DVD drive. When you’re done, you go into My Computer, right click on the virtual drive and hit “Unmount” and you’re all set.

What do do with all those discs after you’ve copied them over? If it’s a disc I’m sure I won’t need the physical version of again (like a data backup, driver disc, etc), I just put a giant scratch on the reading surface (the opposite side the label is on) or break the disc in half, then toss it.

By creating ISO’s on a local or portable drive,  you can easily find the discs you need when you need them, rather than pore through a huge binder (or four binders, in my case) of years of CD’s.

After a weekend of scrambling to find a replacement for “I Want Sandy,” the fantastic email reminder service that’s now being closed, I think I finally hit upon a winner. It’s called “Go Ping Me” and while it doesn’t use natural language queries like Sandy does, it still gets the job done. It’s not as friendly as Sandy, but it’s the closest in functionality to her, and seems to me, at least, to be friendlier and more useful than “Remember the Milk.”

The query language is a bit odd, but you get used to it pretty quickly.

Find out more here - http://www.gopingme.com

It looks like a whole lot of iPhone app developers are getting into the Black Friday spirit today, as Lifehacker (courtesy of Appshopper) notes that there are quite a few apps that are now free in the app store. Head on over and check out the list, there’s sure to be something you want.

Rumors of Microsoft making the Zune into a full-fledged phone have been floated since the day the iPhone was just a glimmer in all our eyes. Today, however, Jim Goldman over at CNBC says he’s heard from “inside sources” that Microsoft will be leveraging the technology gained by taking over smartphone maker Danger to create a Zune phone, currently codenamed “Pink.” Details are still sketchy, but it certainly makes sense that Microsoft would take that purchase of Danger and leverage it into a Zune phone. However, they are stuck with two key issues - 

1. Are they willing to completely alienate their hard-won Windows Mobile customers/partners the way they did when they side-tracked the “PlaysForSure” initiative and created their own mp3 player? Maybe they’re figuring if they sell enough units on their own, it’ll completely offset the possible licensing losses from Windows Mobile defections? 

2. Can they pull it off as elegantly as the iPhone does? Sure it was a bumpy first year, but now the iPhone seems to be the phone (well, besides the Blackberry) in every business and home-user’s hands. The Zune never seemed to gain the long-term momentum the iPod has enjoyed, so unless the phone is a complete miracle of design (which, frankly, Microsoft has never been known for) why would consumers switch from their BlackBerries or iPhones?

Looks like we might hear by this February’s CES what Microsoft’s plans are…

Today over at the NY Times, things aren’t sounding so good for the BlackBerry storm, where it’s being called “a dud.”

C|Net seemed to like it though.

Have you picked one up yet? What do you think?

Just a few moments ago, I posted that “I Want Sandy,” my personal favorite productivity app, is closing its doors in two weeks. Well, after a little sniffing around for alternatives, I actually came upon a whole slew of comments from users where were VERY unhappy about the same loss I’m suffering. It seems a lot of folks feel that the developer of the product has broken their trust by basically saying “So long, and thanks for helping me build my resume.”

The more I read, the sadder I get, seeing a lot of people left to hurry up and figure out what to do now, since there are no plans to keep the service alive, or pass it along to someone else. Which leads me to the question - how many fans of “Web 2.0″ really have backup plans for when their favorite service either tanks, gets bought out, or changes the way they do business (a la Jott).

I think that as we see the economy continue to spiral, there are more Web 2.0 companies heading down the “change, die, or sell out” path, and we all need to start thinking about alternatives, even to some of the better paid apps. If the “I Want Sandy” shutdown is proving one thing - it’s that at any time, a developer can call it quits, and leave you hanging, so have a backup.

Looks like the makers of “I Want Sandy”, my favorite to-do tool, have been purchased by Twitter, and are now being shuttered completely on December 8. Time to hurry up and find an alternative. I just heard about another task manager, called Deadline, and guess I need to check that out ASAP. This is a real bummer for those of us who learned to maximize the use of Sandy with Twitter and other services.