Google Docs

For about two and a half hours on Monday, students at Oxford University couldn’t access Google Docs after the University’s Computing Services team decided to take “extreme action” to halt phishing attacks and also to put pressure on Google. Robin Stevens of OxCert explained in a blog post that, in the past, Google has been slow to respond to requests to help the university. The university’s problem is that phishers are frequently using Google Docs to present phishing forms to its users, with a legitimate domain shown to the user and not detectable by firewalls as Google traffic is over SSL. If phishing mail directing users to pages like this gets past the defenses, it is hard to detect and respond to. ...

Google Operation System Blog: Back in November 2010, a comment from the Google Docs source code revealed some new features that will be available: third party apps, Cloud Print integration and sync. It turns out that the upcoming Google Drive release will add support for third party apps and Google will also include a SDK for developers. This way, you’ll be able to open the files stored in Google Drive using non-Google apps. The Google Docs source code mentions “SDK” several times in connection with Google Drive and the “open with” feature. ...

Native Google Docs support has finally arrived for Android and iOS (the mobile version of Google Docs has been available for over three years). Edits show up in near real-time (so they aren’t completely seamless) and Android even lets you insert text using voice recognition. The biggest improvement is the new layout, which makes mobile document editing much easier and allows for collaboration from other Docs users. Currently, Google Docs supports devices with Android 2.2 (codename Froyo) and up, as well as Apple devices with iOS version 3.0 or newer. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t specify if third-party browsers will work with the new Google Docs or whether it plans on adding new platforms such as Windows Phone and webOS. ...

Google Docs may soon be getting an update that will help it better compete against Microsoft’s latest cloud based Office product and make its upcoming Chrome OS a whole lot more useful. Top among the new features is cloud printing, which will let you print documents — whether web-based, on a mobile device or desktop — to any Internet-connected printer anywhere in the world. ...

Google Docs adds a feature that’s already available in Gmail: you can now upload images using drag and drop. Open a new document and drag an image from your desktop or from a file manager. This feature only works in the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome and Safari because it requires HTML5’s File API. Unfortunately, you can’t upload multiple images and Google Docs doesn’t show a placeholder image or a progress bar. ...

There’s at least one company that isn’t scrambling to get an iPad app ready for launch day, and that company is Microsoft. Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, said in an interview with Bloomberg that the company will “wait and see” how iPad sales perform before adapting Microsoft Office 2010 for the device. “We never say never, but we have no current plans [to develop a version of Office for the iPad],” Elop claimed. ...