Reader, Analytics, Documents, GMail and Calendar - A Quick Tour of our Free Google Tools Software [Video]

Here's a short but action-packed video explaining all the awesome Googleness you can get in Google Tools -

For the visually & aurally impaired (that means you search engine), here's a transcript:

(Transcript)

In this video I'm going to take you on a quick tour of Google Tools, which is one of the free applets that you can download for Really Useful Web Apps. I'll show you where you can download it and how to install it at the end of the video.

Features

So, what's in Google Tools? Well, Google Tools essentially adds two types of features to Really Useful Web Apps. The first feature, or features really, is a bunch of new widgets for the Dashboard . The second feature is a pretty extensive implementation of Google Reader, so you can access your Google Reader RSS feeds right inside the software.

Dashboard Widgets for Multiple Accounts

I'm going to show you the dashboard widgets first, and what's really cool about all of these different widgets is that you can add MULTIPLE widgets for MULTIPLE Google accounts. Why would you want to do that? Well, I know a lot of people use Googles Apps for Domains, so they actually run Gmail, Documents, and Calendar on their different domain name names - and that means you can add the email, calendar and documents widgets for each of these accounts. 

Google Analytics Widgets

The other reason that really makes adding multiple widgets incredibly useful is Google Analytics. Here's the thing, I don't know about you but going into Google Analytics to check all my website stats is a pain in the ass, there's no centralised view and it just takes ages to click through and load each site. We've solved all that - you can pick specific statistics for specific websites and place them on the dashboard, when you come back to the dashboard, those stats just load up without having to spend the time clicking through the Analytics website. 

Secure Authentication with Account Locker

Each time you add one of the Google widgets you'll see that the software is prompting you for your Google credentials, and you'll notice when you add more widgets those credentials are saved and available for you to pick for different widgets. So if you're adding Mail, Documents and Calendar for one account, you've only got to provide those details once, and they're encrypted and saved securely on your hard drive.

What I hope you can see from this is the Dashboard starts to become a really useful place to see a summary of all the information that's important to you, be it mail, site stats, etcetera.

Google Reader

With Google Reader, we've implemented this as a side panel, so you can dock it alongside whatever you're working on, and open up feeds as and when you like. You can add new feeds, delete feeds, and mark feeds as read through the right click options on the panel, and you can also load up feed statistics - this is really cool because it tells you how frequently the blog is posting, and how many subscribers they've got. You'll see a lot of blogs don't publish their subscriber figures and this is a good way of finding out how big their audience is. Bear in mind this statistic is based on Google Reader subscribers, so it won't include the many subscribers that the blog will have in other RSS readers.

View Multiple Feeds

When you click on a feed it opens up in the main tabbed area, and unlike the online version of Google Reader you can have multiple feeds open at one time. 

Feed View Docking

As with all documents and tools within Really Useful Web Apps, you can drag these around and dock them where you like to customise your environment how you wish. 

Adaptive Mutation in Google Reader

What you'll also notice in the Feed view, is a whole bunch of icons above the reading pane. Now this is a feature we call adaptive mutation. What that means is that every applet you install from the App Store has the capability to introduce changes into other applets. 

Google Reader & Delicious Browser interact

For example, I've also got the Delicious Browser applet installed, and that's created one of these mutations in Google Reader, in that it's added this "Add this link to Delicious" button, which allows you to quickly save your favorite Google Reader articles straight to Delicious. This makes the two services work together seamlessly, and the more applets you install the more of these mutations you'll see which make the software more and more powerful each time you add a new applet.

So that's Google Tools, if you use any of these services online I encourage you to download it and give it a try. 

How to Download

To download it, the first thing you need to do is download Really Useful Web Apps which is free, you can get that from the big fat download button on our home page at reallyusefulwebapps.com. Once its finished downloading, just follow the instructions on the download page to install the software, it's pretty easy to step through and install.

Register for a Free Account

You need to register for a free account on the website to get access to the app store, so click on register and enter your details to sign up, you'll need to confirm your email address and once you've done that, you can login and head back to the App Store. 

Google Tools in the App Store

You'll find Google Tools in the free applets section of the App Store on the right, and if you go ahead and click on it, then you can click download. What will actually happen is Google Tools will download within Really Useful Web Apps, so once you've clicked download on the App Store page, head back to the software, and click Help, then Check for Updates.

This will prompt you to enter your new account details, then download Google Tools and any other applets you've chosen to download. You'll need to reboot and then all the Google tools will be available to you.

Thanks

Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoy Google Tools, it's just one of a host of powerful tools you can get in Really Useful Web Apps, so please subscribe to our Twitter, Facebook or YouTube channels for more information about other updates, and subscribe to our RSS feed and email list on the main site for details on special offers and other exclusives.