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New Templates for Google Home Page

I really dig Google’s new themes for the personalized homepage . If you are like me, you spend a good deal of your day with the your Google home page in front of you. So it’s nice to get a more appealing view. But the new themes go beyond just looking pretty - depending on what you choose, they will change through the course of the day based on your location. For example, the page will reflect current weather conditions or the time of day (e.g. bright and cheery for the morning).

To add a theme, click the “Select Theme” link on the right-hand side of your home page. From there you can choose between the classic theme and the six new themes. As Google says, you can use the themes to “make the Google homepage feel a little more like, well, home.”

Example: The Cityscape theme in the morning…

… and at night:

Just-in-time collaboration with Google Apps

One of the things I think is a great productivity enhancement is the Google implementation of just-in-time collaboration.

Gone is the need to set up groups of users before being able to assign groups to documents for collaboration. With Google, you simply add users as collaborators as needed. All you need is their email address - they don’t even have to be Google users.

If you want to use groups, you can use Gmails Groups and simply paste in the email addresses of the group members. Of course, it would be better if you could simply select a Contact Group, but this will have to do for now.