Today came word that the very popular game Scrabulous was taken down by Facebook. It seems the program was infringing on a little well known game called Scrabble owned by Hasbro. While I never played this game online I always saw many people who did. What’s up with Hasbro? Are they just haters on the Agarwalla brothers, and their company, RJ Softwares.
The Brothers created the game and have been in my opinion reaping the rewards. While Face book took down the application it seems they really didn’t want to get the middle of this feud. The website Scrabulous is still operational and the facebook application is no longer being used in the US or Canada but in other countries Hasbro has no rights to the name that is owned by Mattel.
It seems at this time Mattel has not filed any suits to rights overseas but if one starts you can bet the other is going to do it. While this is news nothings really new with this we all know how people create something better than the original, but instead of going to the company and trying to license the rights they keep building on a application that’s stolen.
On another note Facebook users are fighting back by creating groups to try and get the Scrabulous application back all I can say is Good luck with that.
Working a full time job you probably sit at a computer for 8 hours then go home and you have another computer your using. Using so many computers there are gonna be times when you wish you had access to your documents from any computer at any time. If you have Google Docs your not missing a thing in fact your probably laughing right now saying “Is this really news TBTR, I mean honestly.”
There’s nothing to download; you access your documents, spreadsheets and presentations from any computer with an Internet connection and a standard browser. And it’s free.
Scenario your at work taking care of some last minute changes to a document, you get a call and leave in haste. When you get home your winding down about to watch your favorite TV show when you get a call that your friend she needs the list of things you were writing ASAP. You think back did I email that document before I left work? Then you remember it’s saved to your hard drive at work not at home. This leaves your friend with out the document and there is nothing you can do about it. Well sort of, if you had written and saved that document in Google Docs you could use your computer to login find the document and then edit or just send the document to your friend. Thus fixing a situation that may have been disastorious.
Online storage and auto-save mean you needn’t fear local hard drive failures or power outages.
While this is little far fetched it’s still true Google Docs is an online application that lets you create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online at anytime from any computer. Google has set up the system to enable anyone to share, and collaborate in real time. Google Docs accepts most popular file formats, including DOC, XLS, ODT, ODS, RTF, CSV, PPT, etc. Access to your documents can be emailed to anyone you want and they get instant access.
You can publish to the entire world, just a few people or no one — it’s up to you. (You can also un-publish at any time.)
With Google Docs there is nothing to download it’s all done over the internet that also helps with backup of documents. No longer do you have to worry about a hard drive failure or misplacing some important documents you have access from anywhere. Google Docs even lets you post a document to the web with a single click you can set this for viewing by select people or anyone around the world.
You can now track how much traffic a particular published document is getting through Google Analytics.
While most of this article is written for the newbie in mind here is where I explain some of the NEW features that have been placed in this Online Application.
A host of free templates for documents, spreadsheets or presentations
Analytics tracking on published documents is now available
Custom Colors can now be chosen for documents or slides
Output can be to a PDF file so no need for Adobe Acrobat
Tech-Savvy users can now apply CSS to documents
Notes can now be added to your slide presentations
Off line access to your Google docs, sync when internet connection established
Presentations can be saved as PPT
View Google Docs on your mobile phone
Many more features
While Microsoft has stepped up and offered some of the same things with Office Live, Google Docs 100% FREE. While they do offer this for free there is a pay service if your a organization and want to put the whole company on it’s called Google Apps check it out.
While looking for great sites to write about I stumbled across Snapter. Snapter uses your digital camera as a mobile scanner to scan documents, business cards, white boards, and books into your computer in .jpg or .pdf format. Snapter claims to make your camera photos of documents look like scanned documents.
The software automatically crops, stretches, flattens and converts photos into more portable images. I downloaded Snapter installed the application and started using the system. I decided first to take a picture of my receipt from a laptop purchase I had on my desk. I took this picture with my BlackBerry Curve. The picture while nice is not the best of quality when I later zoomed in on the text. Then I decided to take the same picture with my Canon Powershot SD750 I got 100% better quality.
Use your digital camera as a mobile scanner to scan documents, business cards, whiteboards, and books.
Next I decided to try the book I used my recently purchased HTML, XMTML & CSS Book by Peachpit Press. I turned to a random page and clicked a good picture. The image came up but when I clicked to process the output that’s when It went south. Although it worked I could only see one half of the book after the image processed. The picture was of both sides but it seems that some how the light or dark area in the ream of the book wigged the processor in Snapter out. I tried several times to move the line to tell the software that I wanted the other page included on the scan but I could never get it to go far enough.
Snapter makes camera photos look like scanned documents!
Snapter says they have improved the image process algorithms, but in my opinion it still seems to be an issue. Again it could be user error but I tried 3 times with the same results. I will say this if I really took the time to sit back take great pictures of documents and then tried to make .pdf files I would probably get better results but my frustration factor reached critical mass and I stopped trying to tweak it. To help others there is a Getting Started Guide.
The software is not Freeware that is why this was not included on the Wednesday download tag. You get a 14 day trial to use the software with no limits, after that you get a watermark over every scan that you make. The best part is after the 14 days it still works. Kudo’s to the Snapter team for allowing that you know some students would like to use this but cost is a factor.
While I only did limited examples of what you can do here the website will shed more light on the advantages of Snapter.
Today I wanted to let you know about OpenOffice which is the clone of Microsoft’s costly product Office. OpenOffice while different gives you some great features such as:
Text Documents
Spreadsheets
Presentation
Drawing
Database
The products listed are FREE you don’t pay for them because OpenOffice is a Open Source product. If you don’t have the money to purchase the most popular product Microsoft Office, download OpenOffice here.
Wow the internet is a buzz today with so many stories from godaddys meltdown to the apology from apple’s mobileme service.
I found a post from www.scripting.com’s Dave Winer titled “Identi.ca implements the Twitter API” Identi.ca is another twitter clone that has come along recently that looks and feels very much like twitter.
I gather this means that the other apps that have been built for twitter can now be ported over to identi.ca with very minimal changes to your code as a developer.
It will be interesting in the coming days and weeks to see how much of a foot hold identi.ca can really get with this new news.
Today came word that the very popular game Scrabulous was taken down by Facebook. It seems the program was infringing on a little well known game called Scrabble owned by Hasbro. While I never played this game online I always saw many people who did. What’s up with Hasbro? Are they just haters on the Agarwalla brothers, and their company, RJ Softwares.
