Improved Google Docs

Do you think those MS Office tools are way too expensive? Looking for a better alternative? Maybe Google Docs can help you.

I used to think Google Docs was really clumsy and did have the necessary tools to shape my documents how I'd like to. Now, this has all changed. Slowly but surely, Google is able to compete with MS Office. Plus, your documents are available on every computer, so no hassle with memory sticks; you can share files with friends directly, so no hassle with e-mails and twenty 'final' versions of one document. And on top of that: it's completely free!

Google Documents now allows you to make drawings, graphs, charts, presentations, spread sheets, text files - and to share them with your team. Everybody who's working in a team on a shared document is familiar with the problem: several team members edit a document and in the end important adaptations get lost.

Now, everything is stored in the 'cloud' so everybody works in one and the same document. You can chat with other users, while editing a document. You can work with several users in one document at the same time and adaptations are shown live on screen. Letter by letter you can follow changes made by team members.



Source: T-Zine

Skinput transforms you skin into a touch screen

Skinput-technology makes it possible to use your skin as an input-surface for all sorts of mobile applications. By measuring and analysing the acoustic waves in your body produced when tapping your skin signals can be sent to a computer, or more interestingly a smartphone or music player device.

Devices like smartphones or mp3-players are compact and have a lot of power. However, they have very small buttons or gawky touch-screens which limits interaction. Earlier, tables or other hard surfaces were already being used as external keypads. A camera registered your finger's movements over the table and interpreted them as instructions.

However, the recent trend of being mobile always and everywhere inspired the people of Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University to develop Skinput, which uses tappings on your skin as an interface.

When tapping your skin with your finger, the touches create acoustic waves. There a two different types of waves: transversal surface waves which run away from the touch point over the skin's surface and longitudinal waves which run from the outside of our body towards our bones and back to the skin's surface. These waves are detected and analysed by a receiver worn around the arm. A different spot on your body creates a different wave. This allows for giving different instructions.



Source: FlandersDC, Techniline