Google Spreadsheets

There has been an awful lot of hype on the internet about Google's new online spreadsheet offering. Nicholas Carr's blog post on the subject, Google's Office add-on, comes the closest (IMNSHO) to actually getting it right.

Pocket PC Mini-Review: Check Out Magic Button!

Anyone who has a Pocket PC knows that the Pocket PC's greatest strength, multi-tasking, is also its greatest weakness. Microsoft made it easy to run multiple programs at the same time on the Pocket PC, but not all that easy to switch between running programs and really difficult to close them. As a result, task managers for switching between programs and closing them have been a part of the Pocket PC scene almost since Day One. I've tried a number of them over the years, starting with the free (and now-venerable) GigaBar, settling for a long time on SpbSoft's powerful, versatile, and inexpensive Spb Pocket Plus, which I have only recently ditched for TranCreative's free, small, and fast Magic Button.

Replacing Spb Pocket Plus was actually a bit of a trick, since it does so many things so well. But the disadvantage of Pocket Plus doing so many things was that it seemed to be slowing down my otherwise very fast, brand new Axim x50v. Admittedly, it might have just been my imagination, for the most part, but loading the Spb Pocket Plus Today Screen plug-in was definitely slowing down startup times after a soft-reset (which I'm having to do far too often with my new, "much too unstable because all the kinks don't seem to have been worked out" x50v). So, I suppose I could have just turned off the Today Screen plug-in, but there was one feature that I didn't like in Spb Pocket Plus: having to tap-and-hold the X in order to bring up the task-manager was much slower and less intuitive than my old (also bloated and often unstable) task manager, GigaBar. Gigabar's visual presentation of the program icons on the taskbar so that all you have to do is tap the icon to switch to that program has always been my ideal, and that is what Magic Button is best at. Plus, Magic Button only takes up 70Kb of RAM and puts extra icons that don't fit into the task-bar into a handy drop-down menu represented by a triangle button at the end of the row of icons.

Ultimately, task-management on one's Pocket PC is very much a matter of taste, but TranCreative's Magic Button sure left a good taste in my mouth! It's now my main task manager, and, with the addition of free zip-file management using Total Commander for Pocket PC, I now have better versions of both the most important functions of Spb Pocket Plus (at least those were the two most important to me) on my Pocket PC for free! If you're looking for a stable, quick, small, free task-manager for your Pocket PC, be sure to try pressing Magic Button!