Clerks BLAH!

When you think of .PDF files the first thing that comes to mind is Adobe Acrobat Reader. the typical reader that most computers use to read these files. In an effort to always find faster, slimmer, better programs I discovered a program called GSView.

GSView is a free frontend to the GhostScript application that it’s original intention was reading Postscript files, but has evolved GhostScript into a full featured PDF viewer that is incredibly fast. The typical load times for the application ar a second or 2, and even loading a large – graphically rich – file loaded in a third the time Adobe Acrobat Reader took to load. It even beat Foxit Reader, which is another free PDF reader that is designed to be a more lightweight alternative to Adobe.

To install the reader, you must first install the Ghostscript application (http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs864/gs864w32.exe for MS Windows) and then install the GSView application (http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/ghostgum/gsv49w32.exe also for MS Windows).

A great (and fast) program to get the best out of your netbook!

Google Docs

Google Docs is an online (Cloud) application that allows you to view edit and create documents, all through your browser. It shines in the fact that it is tightly woven into it’s other web based apps (gmail for example) which allows you to view a Word or Excel document right from your email. It is 100% free and is a great example of a free product that can be seen as MORE functional than it’s offline counterparts.

The only thing that you lose is a few of the more advanced desktop features.  Honeslty, though, the list of features that Google Docs offers is getting larger and larger by the day.  Google has set up a feature request page, if you do find something that you would like added to the app.  The link to is is here: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=featuresuggest

To get an account, all you have to do is go to: http://docs.google.com and either choose register, or login with your google/gmail account. (doesn’t everybody have one of those?).   From that point you will be on the main screen where you can open a saved document, create a new document, or simply upload an existing document.

So go out there and enjoy this free Cloud App.  Feel free to rate the app at the end of this article and leave any feeback in the comments section!