New Google Calendar Disaster

I used to have White Text on Colored backgrounds which was easy to read.  Now I have Black Text on Colored backgrounds which is difficult to read.  It's really incredible that Google would do something like this to Calendar.  I guess I have to go through and change all my colors and font colors now.  Because they changed something!?!?!?!?! WTF!  Come on Google, don't make Calendar worse.  Black Text on Dark Colored backgrounds, this is embarrassing.

Google Music Beta Crushes Amazon Cloud Player (but still doesn't have a way for me to clean up my library)

Google Music Beta really has it going on (if I only I could mass delete the duplicate songs and see the music I've uploaded separately) when compared to Amazon.  Features that Google has, that Amazon doesn't (and desperately needs):

- Add to Playlist is nicely done with a series of dropdown menus.

- Thumbs Up and down buttons allow me to quickly rate songs (and a Thumbs up playlist, so I can listen to good songs)

- Play count column

- Columns that sort

- Controls are a nice frame, always visible.

I really like this product and wish I could use it more (he said with Amazon Cloud playing in the background).  Right now the major problem is the dupes that were created during upload and the lack of tools to fix this problem (even a delete all would do it for me.  Then I could just re-upload without the dupes.  Really there's no multi select for anything.  Guess that's the real problem.  Seriously Beta.). Nobody wants to listen to a dupey library.

Blogger - "About Me" or "Profile" - choose one or the other!

It's very confusing.  I was trying to copy the design settings of one blog to the other and on the Design page the gadget was labeled "About Me".  When I searched the Gadget library, I found nothing.  I later realized that "About Me" and "Profile" are the same widget.  You'd think they'd both have the same name. That would only make sense.

Gmail Contacts - not very impressive

Messing with contacts today.  Imported some from Apple Address book.  It was easy for me, but a newb would have had to click through to instructions, it didn't just pop up and offer to connect to the address book and import the contacts.

Then I was working on Sorting.  By First Name or by Last Name, but no Show by First Name, Sort by Last Name option.  I moved into the Business tab and found all my Businesses sorted by Last Name, so Papa Murphy's was now Murphy's, Papa and Pizza Guys was transformed into Guys, Pizza.  Obviously this was confusing, so I tried to switch the sorting back, only to be greeted by this error:

the error was confusing and didn't add much to my user experience.

Also I'm pretty sure I don't have individual sort options based upon group, which means my businesses will always be this way (or maybe I'll have to edit them by hand to change their field to business from First Last.  I also had to manually fix the phone number formats, which was annoying.  555-555-5555 should always convert to (555) 555-5555 even if it's in the format I was using for Skype +1555-555-5555)

Also my contacts have no photos.  How about an option to import them from Facebook?  (or even Google Profile, which I know you'd rather push instead)  (could also import Phone Numbers, Birthdays, anything else that facebook has.  We have all these social networks and all these APIs, but is there a way for the truly common man to leverage them?  For example, I love RunKeeper, but I really want the Distance and Date recorded on my Google Calendar and right now I'm doing it by hand.  Do I have to wait until Google buys Runkeeper or Facebook buys Runkeeper to get this kind of simple sharing functionality?  Seems like a nobrainer.)

The contacts list is too small, doesn't seem to have any good sorting options and seems much more like an old fashion email contacts manager rather than a full fledged contacts manager/social network type page that I think you need it to be.

(now back to manually transferring Birthday information from my Birthday Calendar (imported to Gcal from Ical) into Contacts so that it will show up on Calendar and I'll only have one calendar.  Who says I don't do important things?)

PS: I am really impressed by the persistant hilighting.  You need to find a way to tell people about it, because it does cause a bit of a use change when the computer stops forgetting what you were doing and makes list making easy instead of tedious and stressful.

Goo.gl - The Name of Google's URL Shortener shouldn't start with a G

Sure, I want to stop using bit.ly.  The domain name is from Libya and I'm no more attached to the name bitly than I am to any other cutely named short url service.  I'd like to use Google's "Goo.gl", but it's hard to get it to come up in the address bar, because it's named the same as Google, which always comes up when I push G, or Go, or Goo (I have to type "goo.").  Whereas bit.ly comes up when I type bi.  Maybe if Goo.gl had a name that didn't start to G it would be more popular and easier to use.

Blogger - Difficult to create Image with a link

It's easy to upload an image.

It's easy to make a link.

Richard Scarry Google Logo Honors 'Busytown' Creator's 92nd Birthday

It's not easy to make an image with a link.

Why is that?

(I can add a caption that's a link, but it's not the same.  This goes to the general theme that Blogger needs to be more like Tumblr where you can quickly blog an image with a link or a video and move on.  The publishing side of Blogger is near perfect, but the "quick publishing" side, needs a lot of work.

Google develops Time Machine, casually announces it in Google Calendar

Good news!  Google has developed a time machine!  And what an odd, casual way of announcing it.  Just saw this small message across the bottom of my Google Calendar today.  I am of course, excited to Learn More.

Blogger - blog this widget is pathetic

It has a nice button and it looks good in my chrome button bar, but the Blog This extension is worthless and badly needs to be upgraded to crush tumblr.

Situation:  I'm on a blog, I want to publish an image from that blog on my blog with a link and some text.

Blog this Widget: loads a link to the blog.  No easy way to add a picture, or anything else really.

Tumblr Widget: can load the image with text, can load an embedded version of a youtube, quote from an article with a link to an article, etc, etc.

There's no reason that Blogger shouldn't have this functionality.

Google Docs - makes me happy

My spreadsheet just auto resized to fit the data instead of me having to go to settings and change it.  Thank you Google for finally updating the default settings of an "excel" document into something more modern and reasonable.  Keep it up!

Though I disagree with you on your currency setting.  $1000 is nice, but isn't $1000.00 better?

Google Buzz - read items don't change color when read

In Google Reader, it's easy to tell when an item is read because the color dims.  Though I seem to have the same "scrolling counts as reading" rules in Google Buzz, the new message remains yellow causing me to scroll by it several times wondering if this is marking it read, having to rely only on the unread item number on the sidebar....

Chrome - autofill preferences a huge mess

Been using Chrome for a while now.  Finally found it's achilles heel.  An area where the Amazing Googlers who do so much good work, slacked off and left me mass clicking.  I almost couldn't believe I was at a Google App.

Missing from Autofill preferences:

1. Delete all - the only way to clear all the bullshit data that Google has been gathering and simplify my auto fill to one address so it works properly is to individually delete all of the auto fill data one at a time.  I'm well trained in video games, so the clicking is no problem for me, but it's really annoying.

2. Sync - just did this on one of my other computers and now I have to do it again.  Not good.  Not  Google.  Maybe it does sync but it hasn't yet, I don't now cause there's no sync button on the autofill preferences page.

3. Bizarre Floating Window Design - Strange X in the upper right corner to return to the preferences pane, strange floating window breaks the design yet again.  Should just be part of preferences with a menu entry on the left hand column, fully integrated.  Again, I don't know who's putting all these show stopping pop up windows in all your products, but it's a waste of time because you're just going to have to remove them all when you realize how lame and flow breaking they are.

Blogger - edit profile page missing options

Wanted to add some break lines, bolds and links to my profile.  Had to type them in HTML myself, which worked fine, but didn't seem very elegant.  Also it ignored the break lines I put in, converted my beautiful paragraphs into a huge blob of text.  Very ugly.

Google Docs - needs Dropbox-like sync! BADLY! killer ap making feature missing!

Great minds think alike: (COME ON GOOGLE! Get on this. Add dropbox folder sync to Google Docs and TAKE OVER! )

Synch to a folder on the PC as dropbox does - Google Docs Help: "Add the ability to synch a folder on your pc to add to google docs..just like dropbox. And please remove the 250mb file size limit. We are beyond that at this point in time. Dropbox does not have any limitations. Personally, until Google Docs can provide the same services as dropbox, there is no real need to stop using dropbox. Google Docs just seems to be too little too late at this point. Once the same ability is there for Google Docs as there is for dropbox I will switch immediately."

Google Docs - sharing is hard, spell checker missing

It's too hard to add multiple people to multiple documents.  I tried to grant access to my entire collection, but I think it only gave access to the first document, then I had to manually select each document and it didn't remember the people, so I had to re cut and paste their information in.  (looks like I might have been able to just share the collection. Will try it next time.  Still seems like sharing could be more like setting up my friends as editors, seeing them on a sidebar and dragging and dropping groups of documents to them.  Or creating a group for them, like Book Editors, and then being able to drag and drop multiple items to a group representing multiple people.)

Spell Checker - Standard search and replace spell checker seems to be missing.  I'd like to go through the document word style, not just clicking on annoying red lines.

maybe the greatest thing that google has ever done...  when I pushed send, it asked me if I wanted to attach a file, since I mentioned it in the email and forgot to attach it... brilliant!