The Create menu now puts third-party apps at the same level as Google’s own apps (Docs, Sheets, etc.). This is huge for developers creating Drive-enabled apps.

Users can add apps to their menu by clicking “Connect more apps.” There’s also a new “Connect more apps” dialog.

“If your app is already Google Drive-enabled and listed in the Chrome Web Store’s Drive collection, you don’t have to do anything new to take advantage of these new features,” Google’s Nicholas Gamier tells developers. “We will automatically pull all the information from your existing Chrome Web Store listing.”

“If your web app is not yet Google Drive-enabled, check out how you can integrate with the create-new and the open-with actions and then get your Drive-enabled app listed in the new Connect apps to Drive dialog,” he adds.

I know, I know. A YouTube video detailing the science behind human productivity (and the lack thereof)? Poppycocks, you say. But it’s from our favorite science animators over at AsapSCIENCE, so we trust them.

Now, get to work.

For more awesome science animations, check here.

In collaborative efforts, users can hover over cells that have orange triangles in them to see full discussions, and or reply.

Comment numbers are tallied at the bottom of the screen on the sheet tab. You can hover over the icon to show all comments on the sheet.

“And just like you’re used to with comments elsewhere, you can +mention someone to automatically include them in a discussion and send them a notification via email – and they can even reply to the comment without leaving their inbox,” says Google software engineer Patrick Donelan in a blog post.

“Any comments that were created in spreadsheets before today are still available and saved as ‘Notes’,” adds Donelan. “These are shown in your spreadsheet using a black triangle in the corner of the cell to differentiate them from the new discussion-style comments. You can also create new notes from the ‘Insert’ menu if you need to leave a quick annotation on a cell.”

In other Google Drive news, it appears that Google Drive for iOS is about to get in-app editing and the ability to see presentations. Google accidentally leaked the news before withdrawing it, only to have it spotted beforehand.

“We’re really excited to bring this solution to small and medium businesses around the world. It’s the same Evernote that’s used by nearly 40 million people around the world, but with additional features that make it great for companies like yours and ours,” says Evernote’s Andrew Sinkov.

CEO Phil Libin discusses the product here:

It comes with an admin console, which admins can use to manage company data. Businesses can create Notebook directories with content important to all employees, and employees can publish notebooks to the business directory to collaborate with others in the company. Evernote Business customers also get access to dedicated “Customer Success Managers” via phone calls.

“Any content that is placed into designated Evernote Business notebooks within user accounts is managed and owned by the business,” says Sinkov. “Anything created and stored in a user’s personal Evernote account is controlled by the user.”

Employees can upgrade their personal accounts if they work for companies using Evernote Business.

Evernote Business will be available in December. You can sign up for early access here.

The company also announced some other features today. For one, they added a new Related Notes feature and highlighting to the browser extension Evernote Clearly.

Evernote also partnered with Moleskine on a smart notebook.

A new study published on Psychology Today took a look at the study habits of roughly 300 students from middle school, high school, and university. The researchers were interested in observing whether the students could maintain focus for fifteen minutes while studying “something important” in a familiar environment or, if they couldn’t, what was causing distractions for the students.

Beyond the discouraging result that these students couldn’t maintain focus for more than an average of three minutes, the researchers found that the number one distraction for the students was technology, mostly in the form of computers and smartphones. Dr. Larry Rosen, a Professor of Psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, describes the further investigation into whether these distractions were predictive of academic performance, as well as what the seemingly benign effect of checking Facebook was:

We also looked at whether these distractors might predict who was a better student. Not surprisingly those who stayed on task longer and had study strategies were better students. The worst students were those who consumed more media each day and had a preference for working on several tasks at the same time and switching back and forth between them. One additional result stunned us: If they checked Facebook just once during the 15-minute study period they were worse students. It didn’t matter how many times they looked at Facebook; once was enough.

In other words, Facebook slaps a stranglehold on your cognitive abilities. When Rosen’s team asked students why they felt so compelled to check Facebook, some of them replied that it was due to an alert they received. However, some of them simply admitted that they were sitting there wondering if somebody had responded to their Facebook post yet.

The overlap between social media and work is increasing more and more although it’s possible that constantly checking out what’s going on Facebook could be killing productivity in the workplace. Rosen’s research seem to not only corroborate the fact that Facebook wrecks your motivation to get tasks done in the office, but it could also be the reason you got crummy grades in school.

[Via LifeHacker.]

Twenty percent of employees know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re a guy, twenty-seven percent of you and if you’re a girl, thirteen percent of you may need to consider taking down those brackets you copied with your company’s copier and taped or pinned to your walls and replace them with the workflow charts, schedules and time sheets that normally make up the decor of your office space.

Now, if productivity numbers are really down, businesses may need to consider that a recent survey from CareerBuilder of 7,000 workers found that one-in-ten employees actually watched March Madness games while at work and 17% spent at least an hour a day checking scores while on the clock.

While there is something to said for the camaraderie, spirit and team building aspects of the office’s participation in the exciting NCAA college basketball tournament each year, it should relieve a number of CEO’s and CFO’s especially that when March wagering and office pools are over, April will probably be a banner month for companies (if March took a dip), at least until Spring break and vacation season come around.

The new came courtesy of The Daily, who claimed that an image was in fact the new program running on an iPad. That image came with the news that Office for iPad was set to be submitted for approval to the app store within weeks. It reportedly looks a lot like OneNote and will start off with the three basic Microsoft applications Words, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Shortly after the initial report, Microsoft hit back – they denied that the image was a real Microsoft software product and said that The Daily’s story was “based on inaccurate rumors and speculation.”

Well, the fight spilled over to Twitter. An official Microsoft account @MSFTnews tweeted this late Tuesday evening:

The Daily’s Peter Ha retweeted that Microsoft tweet, and later this:

That link led to a writeup where they stick by their story:

Let’s get one thing straight: We did not fabricate this story, nor did we fake the images in any way. A Microsoft employee, not a contractor, demoed a prototype of the app for us. We were repeatedly told that it wasn’t the final build and we did not report it as such, which is probably why Microsoft has said that it isn’t their software. Truth is, there are probably several versions of the launch screen being reviewed internally.

However, another Microsoft employee who is much closer to the project has confirmed to us several times over the last few months that Office for iOS is real and that it would be launching soon. We originally reported on this very thing back in November and a few weeks later, Microsoft released OneNote for iOS. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Microsoft commented further to ZDNet, or rather declined to comment about whether or not there is a version of Office for iPad in development – just that the image in The Daily article wasn’t their software. It’s entirely possible that it’s just a case of Microsoft distancing themselves from a build of the software that’s not going to look anything like the finished project.

I guess we’ll know in a few weeks if The Daily’s Microsoft source was right about the Office Suite launching soon. Until then, you’ll have to stick to iWork and third-party apps for your productivity needs.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: Back in November of 2011, rumors of an upcoming Microsoft Office app for the iPad elicited both excitement and skepticism, with a hearty dose of pessimism thrown in there as well. There exists Office-like apps for the iPad, but many people (like me, lifetime PC users who now spend a lot of time on an iPad) have failed to get behind any of them – since they weren’t the Office suite that they were used to.

Office lovers have reason to rejoice, as The Daily now reports that an official Microsoft Office app for the iPad has already been completed and will be submitted for approval in the next couple of weeks.

So what will it look like? Apparently, the interface looks a lot like OneNote, Microsoft’s current note-taking application for the iPad. OneNote allows users some word processing functionality with notes, to-do lists, and cloud storage. But an official Office app would incorporate more than just notes.

The app is set to start off running Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – all of which support both online and local editing. The Daily says that it’s unknown whether or not other Office properties will be a part of the launch. They do say that OneNote will be getting an update along with the new app suite. An Android version of Microsoft office it apparently not happening at this time.

Apple released their own productivity suite, iWork, on the iPad last May. The three apps (Keynote, Pages, and Numbers) were optimized for a touch screen and set at the $9.99 price point (per app). Although no price for Microsoft Office for iPad has been announced, one would think that it would at least be somewhere in that ballpark.

“A year and a half ago, we released completely new document, spreadsheet and drawing editors. Google Docs has been picking up speed ever since with more than 60 new features and millions of new users,” says software engineer Steven Saviano on the official Google Blog. “Today we’re rounding out the suite by previewing a new version of presentations with faster collaboration and more features.”

“Presentations are made to be shared—whether it’s presenting your thesis to your professors or inspiring colleagues at a conference,” he adds. “And the best presentations are made together, collaborating with others to build a compelling story that captivates your audience.”

With the new version, presentations can be created by more than one person simultaneously, and you can see exactly what others are working on with “presence markers”. Teams can edit simultaneously, and there is a revision history feature so you can see who made changes or revert to earlier versions. There is also a built-in chat feature. Are we seeing some Google Wave creep in here?

Google says it’s gradually rolling out the new version of Presentations, but you can use it now if you go to Document Settings, click the editing tab, and check the box next to “Create new presentations using the latest version of the presentation editor.”

Google says you’ll need a “modern browser” if you want to be able to edit with the new version.

Google also says more collaboration features are on the way.

The company recently opened its Product Ideas page, as a tool to gather feedback from users about what they’d like to see next in Google Docs. Google got 4,000 people to participate and submit about 2,000 ideas, and these are apparently the ones they decided were most important to get out sooner rather than later.

“There were many other great ideas – from making Google Docs available as attachments in Gmail to allowing the use of Google Fonts across all Google Docs tools,” wrote Google Docs community manager Teresa Wu on the Google Docs blog. “While we can’t get started on these requests just yet, we’ll be sure to keep them in mind for future improvements.”

You can see all of the Google Docs ideas here. The page utilized Google Moderator, so you can see the ones that were voted up the most in order. It looks like the most popular idea was allowing the use of all Google fonts across all the Google Docs tools. Second was seamless integration between Google Docs tools: such as inserting part of a spreadsheet into a document, then the header/footer stuff. Those 3 priority features were all in the top six though.

This is another example of Google communicating with users to help improve its products – something the company has been doing a whole lot of with and on Google+. We talked about that here, looking at how open Google has been about potential new features for Google+.