Hack 3. Make a Desktop Icon to Create a New Document

You launch desktop programs from the desktop. Why not launch Google programs from the desktop, too?

If you want to open up Google Spreadsheets to create a new file, you can point your browser to http://www.google.com and choose "Documents" from the "more" menu on top, then click NewSpreadsheet. A quicker way to do this is to use a bookmark, but Motti Strom, Mobile Software Engineer at Google UK, suggests an even better way: create a desktop icon to launch Google documents, spreadsheets, or presentations.

Windows

Start by right-clicking any free spot on your Windows desktop and selecting NewShortcut from the context menu, as shown in Figure 1-12. Type the following address for the shortcut:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?new

Save your shortcut, and name it "New Google Spreadsheet."

Mac OS X

Whether or not you use Safari, open it up. Create a new bookmark (BookmarksAdd Bookmark) for whatever page opens up; it doesn't matter because you're going to change it in a moment. Give the bookmark the name "New Google Spreadsheet." Next, select BookmarksShow All Bookmarks, and edit the bookmark you just created to replace the URL with http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?new. Now, drag this bookmark to your desktop. If you don't want to keep the bookmark in Safari, you can delete it now, because you have a copy on the desktop.

Try It

This shortcut will let Google launch a new unnamed Spreadsheet for you. Give the icon a try by double-clicking it. Note that you may be required to log in to your Google account if you aren't already.

You can create a second desktop shortcut for Google Documents. Use the same method, but pick the following URL for the shortcut:

http://docs.google.com/?action=newdoc

Save the shortcut, name it "New Google Document," and give it another try.

For a Google Presentations shortcut, use the following URL, naming it "New Google Presentation":

http://docs.google.com/?action=new_presentation

Changing the Icons

You can improve on this hack by using nicer icons than the default. Enter the following URL in your browser's address bar to access the Google Spreadsheets icon:

http://www.google.com/images/spreadsheets/favicon.ico

This is a so-called "favicon," a 16 x 16 pixel image that the browser displays in bookmarks or the address bar when you visit a web site. But because it's an .ico—icon—file type, you can reuse it as an icon for your short cut. If your web browser didn't automatically download it for you, right-click the image to download it to your computer. Once you have downloaded the icon, rename it spreadsheets.ico.

Repeat the same process with the Documents and Presentations icons at the following two addresses, and give it the name documents.ico and presentations.ico:

http://docs.google.com/favicon.ico

http://docs.google.com/presently/images/favicon.ico

Now go back to the three desktop shortcuts that you created to add these icons. On Windows, right-click your "New Google Spreadsheet" shortcut, select Properties from the context menu that appears, switch to the Web Document tab and click the "Change Icon" button. Browse to find your icon named spreadsheets.ico and click OK to use it.

On Mac OS X, download the program img2icns from http://www.shinyfrog.net/en/software/img2icns/ and drag the .ico file onto it to create a proper Mac OS X icon file. Switch to the Finder, click to highlight the icon file that img2icns created (img2icns puts files on the Desktop by default), and select EditCopy. Right-click on your "New Google Spreadsheet" shortcut, and choose Get Info. Click the icon in the upper left, and press Command-V to paste the icon in. After you've done this, you can delete the .ico file and the icon you created, if you want to.

Voila! You can do the same for your "New Google Document" and "New Google Presentation" icons by using the documents.ico and presentation.ico files instead of the one for spreadsheets. You will now have icons based on the Google Docs graphics, as shown in Figure 1-13.

Adding a Keyboard Shortcut

On Windows, you can attach a custom keyboard shortcut to desktop shortcuts. To do so, just right-click your shortcut named "New Google Spreadsheet" and click into the Shortcut key field. Enter Ctrl-Alt-S—or another shortcut, though some shortcuts are reserved by Windows and cannot be chosen—and approve the dialog. Now, you can press Ctrl-Alt-D anywhere in Windows to launch a new spreadsheet with Google.

You can repeat the same process for your "New Google Document" and "New Google Presentation" shortcuts. Pick Ctrl-Alt-D, or Ctrl-Alt-P, or any other keyboard shortcut you can easily remember, and you will now be able to quickly launch Google Docs word processing and presentation documents from Windows.

Create a Shortcut Icon for an Existing Document

You can also create a shortcut to any existing Google document of yours. Maybe there's a shared To Do list for your project at work, and you access it quite regularly; speeding up the launch process would be nice.

First, open up your document in the browser as usual by going to http://docs.google.com and clicking its title. Most browsers will now display the "favicon" icon at the left side of the address bar. Drag and drop this favicon onto your desktop, and the shortcut will be created for you automatically. You can close the document now and double-click the icon later on to launch it again. (Be aware that if you already have the document opened in your browser, clicking this shortcut will create a second window with your document.)

NOTE

For further ways to integrate Google web apps into the desktop, take a look at the Mozilla Prism project at http://labs.mozilla.com/featured-projects/#prism.