theParagon

Nummy nuggets of web-based love

The line between “regular” applications that run on your computer and web-based applications continues to blur. A few co-workers recently sent out a few links to web-based things that are traditionally applications that run locally. I’ve played around with writely.com and so far I’m pretty impressed.

One of the primary advantages of doing things on the web, of course, is that you can access them from anywhere. In the case of writely.com, for instance, I can start a document on my machine here at home tonight, and work on it tomorrow at work, without sending the document to myself or otherwise saving it and transporting it from place to place. The document is saved on writely’s servers, so I can get at them from any web browser, anywhere, anytime.

To add to the pile of web-based goodness:

http://writely.com - Rich originally sent this one out, but I’ve been using it and so far it’s great. It bears mentioning again — VERY handy for the right kind of work, and it allows collaborative work so multiple wirtely.com users can edit a document (if you so choose).

http://zimbra.com Zimbra is probably the most ambitious web-based application I’ve seen. It’s actually a suite of applications that promise to rival Outlook’s abilities in the areas of contact management, group scheduling, e-mail, and so on. Particularly impressive are its e-mail management features, with respect to searching, cross-referencing, and tagging. Watch the flash overview, then play with the hosted demo. There are some performance issues (load time is a little slow), and I don’t know about full browser compatibility, but this is very ambitious and impressive so far.

http://strongspace.com - Do you back up your data to an external hard drive? Good for you. What happens if your house burns down? Or if your drive AND computer are stolen? Both copies of your data are gone. Strongspace provides storage for your digital life, and pricing is based on how much you use. 4GB is $8/month, and the plans go up from there. One option: Zip up everything you want to save and upload the zip file every now and again. Otherwise, for the command-line-enabled, rsync directories out to the strongspace server. And, it’s all encrypted. No (horrible, nasty, insecure) FTP for you.

http://thinkfree.com - You know Microsoft Office? Imagine that on the web. At least that’s what they claim to be doing with thinkfree.com (the online edition — there’s a run-on-your-machine edition, too). Spreadsheet, word processing, and presentation software, (supposedly) full import and export capabilities with Office documents, and PDF exports built-in. It might not be fully buzzword-compliant because it’s Java-based and so has to be run as an applet vs. AJAX, but it’s still a web-based application, at least to some degree.

http://meebo.com - meebo is a web-based instant messaging environment. It can grab info from your current AIM, MSN, Yahoo, GTalk (etc.) account and serve as your instant messaging client. I don’t think it makes sounds, so you have to check the window every now and again, but… well, I guess you can’t have it all. Yet.

http://roundcube.net - Roundcube is an AJAX mail client. It’s still in alpha, but looks promising.

http://www.aypwip.org/webnote/ - Webnote is a web-based pile o’ post-it notes. It’s klunky right now and a little unpredictable, so I’m not sure how useful it will turn out to be, but it’s an interesting proof-of-concept for web-based aplications.

posted on November 9, 2005 | 12:11 PM EST