In keeping with having my “head in the clouds” recently (cloud computing), as I eluded to in my Aviary posting a few days ago, I have to admit that I have been giving Google Docs a HEAVY workout over the past few months.
Every time I’ve been tempted to fire-up OpenOffice (which I LOVE, for what it’s worth) to work on a document, spreadsheet or presentation, I have thought: “No…I’m going to do this one using nothing other than web-based apps.” What is interesting is that the more files I have produced for work AND play this way, the more ideas I have had for just how much MORE I could/should be doing in the clouds.
An example of a recent document I have produce completely over the Internet is a workshop presentation I am giving in April at a University and College Designers Association regional conference at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. That presentation is entitled “Wayfinding Styles: How Individuals Navigate Space In Different Ways.” Looks every-bit as good as something I could have produced in MS PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress…with all the benefits of living out on the ‘net related to portability. Outstanding!
About the only thing I have found using Google Docs so far that I have not liked or understood is why Google chooses to embed various theme images with every presentation that one develops…as that is seemingly adding hundreds of KB to the size of displaying one’s presentation for absolutely no good reason. To add insult to injury, many of those theme images have also not been optimized. As they would say on that wonderful TV Show Seinfeld: “Serenity now….serenity now.” Google is a PHENOMENAL, wonderful company! They really need someone to sit down with folks around there, however, and tell them how to stop wasting “1″ with a “google” zeros after it in bandwidth consumption. 
For your viewing pleasure, here are five of those Google themes that you’re having the privilege of loading but not viewing when you look at that Wayfinding presentation I mentioned previously:
Unoptimized 800×600 pixel .jpg graphic – 99,001 bytes
Optimized 800×600 pixel .jpg graphic – 94,569 bytes
Unoptimized 800×600 pixel .jpg graphic – 45,649 bytes
Optimized 800×600 pixel .jpg graphic – 35,799 bytes
Unoptimized 800×600 pixel .jpg graphic – 43,336 bytes
Optimized 800×600 pixel .jpg graphic – 39,487 bytes
Unoptimized 800×600 pixel .jpg graphic – 42,218 bytes
Optimized 800×600 pixel .jpg graphic – 39,212 bytes
Unoptimized 800×600 pixel .jpg graphic – 23,866 bytes
Optimized 800×600 pixel .jpg graphic – 18,683 bytes
A simple bit of removing excess colors and applying a very careful amount of custom zonal compression (since Google had applied 14-20+ percent universal compression to those images previously) using xat.com’s Image Optimizer took 248 KB of imagery and reduced them to 222 KB in cumulative size, an improvement of just over ten percent.
Thank you, Google, for making such a wonderful tool such as Google Docs available to the masses! Just try and see what you can do to reduce or eliminate the bandwidth that needs to be processed in order to display the resulting files.
