Tag Archives: google

Multiple Accounts in Google Drive

Google released their Google Drive last week, and I’m feeling conflicted about it. On one hand it’s awesome, nearly everything I would want in a document sharing service; on the other hand Dropbox has been providing me with similar functionality for years when Google couldn’t or wouldn’t, so I have a certain level of loyalty there.

Regardless of my internal struggles I thought I would point out one glaring issue I have with Google Drive: I have 2 Google accounts, a personal one and a work one, and this intentional line in the sand cannot be crossed.

Based on a statement from their support website it is currently

“not possible to use Google Drive for your Mac/PC with more than one account at the same time”

Okay that is fine with me actually, but at least let me configure two accounts in settings (each with their own separate shared directory) and then let me switch between the one that is actively syncing. The disconnecting and connecting with a different account (as they suggest) doesn’t really solve the issue of keeping these two accounts separate.

This was never really an issue with Dropbox for me because of how I structured my Dropbox directory, whereby my “Work” directory was shared with work people, and my “Home” directory was shared with family.

Besides that one glaring issue I have to say, I am very impressed with Google Drive. The integration with Google Docs is especially brilliant.

At this point Drive and Dropbox coexist happily together on my Mac, each being used for something slightly different.

IE6 Is Almost Dead, Really This Time!

Google really knows how to make me happy on a Tuesday morning:

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 ?as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar. …

So now that Google is finally getting rid of IE6 support, the rest of the net will cave (if they haven’t stopped already) and if all goes well by the end of the year IE6 will be nothing but a story us geeks can tell over pint…

[joe] Oh, remember that time when I had to spend 3 days rewriting that great Javascript tool so that Neophyte Bob wouldn’t have to upgrade his nine year old web-browser?

[steve] 3 days! Meh, that’s nothing, try 5 days trying to get basic CSS2 to function properly.

[joe] Yeah, wasn’t there some sort of library we used called ie7.js to give it basic support?

[steve] I don’t think so, why would someone have to write a Javascript library for that?

[steve] Oh wait, yeah… that’s right, they did.