Fresh on the verge of the announcement of its purchase of YouTube, Google has launched Google Docs and Spreadsheets.  Google Docs and Spreadsheets gives the user the ability to create documents and spreadsheets online, and have access to the files wherever they go.

Some nice features I found while using the tool was the ability to upload my existing word documents, and edit them online.  I was then able to convert these files to various file types including Adobe PDF.

Another nice feature is the ability to e-mail documents to Google Docs & Spreadsheets! If you were an exisiting Writely user, you can easily convert your Writely account to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Other features include:

• Attach documents to emails and send to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
• Complete online editor with spell check.
• Upload documents via web site.
• Document revision tracking system.
• Share documents with others via e-mail invitations.
• Post documents right to your blog.

Supports:

• HTML files and plain text (.txt).
• Microsoft Word (.doc), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw).
• Comma Separated Value (.csv).
• Microsoft Excel (.xls) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods).

Visit Google Docs & Spreadsheets here.

I remember when I was creating web pages back in 1993.  It was pretty awesome back then! It got better and better as time went on but it was always so difficult to do things that seemed like they should be very simple!  Notepad was great for learning html, JavaScript, etc.  Provided a really good foundation!  Then came Hot Dog! from Sausage Software.  A neat tool that allowed you edit html much easier than ever before!  It also had saved code snippets you could to create special effects, which for the most part would later become extremely annoying! Then of course came the Microsoft products, the Macromedia products, and the Adobe products, all taking the game to the next level.  One thing however I have always had trouble with was debugging web pages.  And I don’t mean the typical .net debugging, that all works great now.  I’m talking about debugging styles, graphical interfaces, placement of objects, etc.  Here are some “Swiss Army Knife” tools that I have started using that I absolutely love!

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

Back in March of 2006 Microsoft released an awesome tool that I can’t live without as a web developer, IE Dev Toolbar.  Why it took them this long to release this tool is beyond me.  It finally exposes the inner core of Internet Explorer to web developers and allows you to do a slew of neat things!  Installing the tool is very easy and appears as a toolbar, which you can load and has various features:

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
  View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS Web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.

Figure 1 – Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar 

Google Webmaster Central

Google commands so much respect, as the new Wal-Mart of the Internet.  If you are to make any type of money or impact on the Internet, a great listing on Google is key.  Google Webmaster Central will give you the inside track on how Google crawls and indexes your site.  From the ability to create site maps that you can upload to the Google servers for crawling, to following up on how the Google spiders see your web site, this site will give you an edge against other competing sites!

Figure 2 – Google Webmaster Central