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Online Replacements for Desktop Apps?
Jon_Aquino asks: "I'd like to share this Google Groups thread of free online replacements for desktop apps. Some of the gems are: an online UML diagrammer, an online Paintbrush app, online Post-It notes, an incredibly realistic text-to-speech converter, and an online spreadsheet. What are other cool online desktop-app replacements?"
I saw an online Minesweeper replacement somewhere. Only worked with Mozilla, though.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
This isn't specific to online apps, but rather one that was posted (computer TTS). Something I found interesting were different voice synths for different languages or accents.
How to make the MS "Merlin" agent more annoying? Give him a French accent!
Right is wrong when left is right.
i dont know about you guys but i dont think i would use those apps... if you dont have access to excel/mspaint, i would always rather have a flashdrive with them or variations on there rather then relying on third party web page being online to get something halfway useful done...
Sheesh.
The more you know, the less you understand.
you just spent 5 minutes making the online text to speech tool say dumb stuff like 'all your base are belong to us'.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I want an online replacement for my web browser. Even Firefox takes too much memory on my PC.
Have you read my blog lately?
One of the reasons Microsoft fought so hard in the browser wars was because it was felt that the *real* platform could well become the browser, which you could then access applications via, not the underlying OS.
Looks like they won...
Does a browser count as a desktop app?
If it does, then Simpy is definitely a superior online replacement for bookmarks (really more than bookmarks, but let's keep it at that). Here is a demo and some screen shots.
Simpy
What is the Internet coming to? It's like saying "Hotmail" is "Internet Mail" and "The WWW" is "The Internet".
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
you demonstrated the greatest flaw of online apps: ;-/
They depend on a running server. These just died.
The Google Calculator
Perhaps not an desktop app as much an Enterprise ap; but they're much nicer than other sales software that ran on desktops that I've used.
Those online apps are very useful. Really who is going to use paint to make a picture. Or that online spreadsheat program when you can just install the program on your hardrive and use it their where it's faster and more fully featured. Pluss if you are a secure network then you couldn't use them anyways. I just don't really see the point.
BaseCamp is probably the best project manager I've seen, and it's online. I don't get it, why can't desktop apps be this cute and easy to use? Just go look at the screenshots!
:-) (This is one benefit of regular desktop software)
Of course, I don't have a paid up BaseCamp membership since I think it's overpriced, but there you go
you are a very easy person to please. Its not really a replacement for anything.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
That text-to-speech proggy could come in handy for making up your own custom wacky answering machine messages. You never know, Slashdotters -- callers might actually believe you've got a live-in girlfriend!
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I thought the much-hyped application server revolution never happened, because people just don't want to share personal or proprietary information or need the guaranteed availablility of a locally-installed app. The only real popular web apps I can think of are the search engines of various types (web, real estate, personal ads, etc.) and, perhaps, those on-line tax services (you give them your information at a store front, too). Otherwise, the WWW is still mostly just a place to share information, mail-order stuff, and post flamebait to forums like this one.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
There are online sex partner simulators all over the innurnet. They're not too realistic though, as the feedback device feels very much like a squeezing hand...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Wait, wait, wait.
Did I read this right?
FREE software?
Like, you mean, it's free for two weeks then I have to buy it? Or you mean that it's not free, but you found a place to pirate it?
Or...no. It... it's not possible. Are you seriously coming here, to Slashdot, and telling us that there are software packages that we don't have to pay for, and can still legally use?
Holy crap, man.
These guys have great webmail(Imp) ; nice web based file managers (Gollem); a nice CVS viewer.
From their FAQ
...he's talking about Google Groups. I've seen Usenet before. It's full of binaries, not this stuff.
Breakfast served all day!
In the mid late 90's when everyone was going to use the netscape web browser and Sun's java to run all their applications from applets on thin-client sun terminals. Oh, and all your news would come from "Push" technology like Pointcast.
I've never been one to rely too heavily on online apps.
Something about trusting my data (confidential or not) to some unknown, faceless entity, for lack of a better term, has always kept me away from such services.
Not that I'm a paranoid guy or anything ("even paranoid people have enemies!"), but who knows who's really seeing what your data, and who knows what they might do with that knowledge. Whether it's initially (mis)used or not, the danger is there. And if it's archived anywhere along the way, the potential for misuse is even greater, as now anyone down the road can come along and find/sell/misuse it.
"See this killer app that everyone's talking about? That was my idea! But no sooner had I began sketching out my flow on gmodeler then 'Boom!' it was patented and being marketed everywhere. That shoulda been me...." (Not that GModel would ever do this, but it's a good example of my point).
Not to mention the confidentiality issue... I work for a financial services company, and a few years ago, we were looking at ways to quickly re-purpose a bunch of PDF documents to HTML, and one proposed solution was a web service that offered online conversion of such documents for free. Clearly though the privacy issues, not to mention potential for misuse of the data made us choose a different avenue!
Plus there's always the fear of relying on the online apps. If I become dependant upon it, either for my work, or for the convenience it offers, what am I to do if suddenly the site goes under, becomes a pay site, or simply changes URLs due to a provider going down.
Not that there aren't any valuable services out there, there are! It's just that I feel safer relying on local software, and homegrown solutions. Am I alone with this perception?
This would be great for language learning. You could just cut and paste in a foreign language text, choose a voice appropriate to that language, and hear approximately how a native speaker would pronounce it. I wish there was a Mandarin version.
A comprehensive directory of web applications can be found here (link mentioned in the usenet thread).
I've been following this lately, it seems that the Open Office folks are working with the XDesktop movement- api: Interface XDesktop. It all makes sense, why install software that you rarely use? I'd much rather have it on a central server, think about lic costs, think about the easy of patching said software once, instead of hundreds of places...
CBG
free ipod and free gmail!
Oh my God, they totally forgot the killer app!
Find free books.
I hear that the website over at http://slashdot.org is a great online replacement for actual work.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Wow. I just tested the Spanish version. It's incredibly natural. I'm speechless (no pun intented)
The English output still sounds like a robot. The Spanish one is almost humanlike.
For those who don't know, Spanish has a nearly perfect spelling system: by the spelling you know how to pronounce the word exactly. Of course, regional dialects change the pronunciation, but it's always consistent.
The other way around is not true, though. Two words with the same pronunciation may have different spellings, specially because of the V-B, S-C-Z, CC-X, C-K.
The SSH client is widely available from various sources, particularly universities. Just Google for "mindterm ssh" to find a location near you.
One caveat: I've only used this using Internet Explorer (since that is always on a public Windows machine), but the SSH client is also supposed to work with Netscape.
AT&T would like to thank slashdot for load testing their new TTS system. Which i must say held out pretty well during its 15 minute bombardment of "fuck me hard" (audrey) "last time on star trek voyager" (claire) and "essen mein sheizer. oh yah. dass ist gut!" (both of the germans). And thus, we learn the reason why we dont use online replacements for desktop apps: we all have our own computing power, a website cant handle all of us.
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http://actor.loquendo.com The best-sounding TTS program I ever heard, for any language I speak. Outputs mp3's up to 30 seconds in length, and even longer wav's. It's down right now... Slashdotted?
...to turn your top-of-the line PC into a 286 era performer.
Puh-leez. I'd like to boot to BIOS so that I can load DOS so that I can run Windows so that I can use IE so that I can set up a VM so that I can sandbox an application so that I can use a buggy Java editor to write a self-worship web page?
As an exercise in emulating those Russian dolls that keep getting smaller and smaller, sure. As a real-world computing solution? I'll know we're in hell if this ever achieves wide-spread adoption. The current deluge of web-based Java apps is already turning my hair grey with bugs, security exploits, extremely nasty functionality, and spontaneous page refreshes which cause my recent changes to be replaced with the 5 minute old information that the server has.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
i used it to create my voicemail message. some people think i have a british secretary now.
For some applications, such as the Lemmings Clone, or the calculator, or a number of others, there's no real reason to save what one had created with the program, as the output is only immediately important. The application is used a few times, and the outputs are used immediately, or within a few hours.
For other online applications, such as online office applications, or the like, the need to save a document (or other work) is manifestly important. Currently, documents can be saved on the computer on which one works, but then one still requires a storage medium to cart around in order to keep the document with the person during travel. Which means that the online office application is a good way to save money, or to be able to create office documents on a computer without office applications (word processors, spreadsheets, etc.), but a person will likely use a word processor which is located on the computer if one is present.
However, with remote storage, online applications could begin to take off as the primary application, replacing their installed counterparts: the same document could be edited in the same word processor on two (or fifteen) different computers, reducing the number of people who need to use and carry laptops. In addition, if and when online office applications appear in great numbers for mobile devices, e.g. the Palm or the Zaurus, an online office application will make even more sense in terms of storage management, as no local application is needed, and the document can be stored off the palmtop somewhere else, and be edited from a desktop at work or home, as well as the palmtop on the road.
This sig space intentionally left blank.
some use an emulator plugin, but alot just use shockwave/flash.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Actually an "online browser" has some merit ... Sometimes when I'm using a computer without Firefox I wish I could go to firefox.com and have tabbed browsing, find-as-you-type, URL aliases, searching Google from the toolbar, etc. All this implemented in clever JavaScript, perhaps.
Plug warning: I'm the project admin
Go check out the Sydney project. There's an example at http://sydney.sourceforge.net/sydney_example.html.
Sydney is an all-Javascript/CSS/DOM project intended to create applications that run in your browser but look like desktop apps. It's already in use in a real project, but I'm not sure how much I can say about it, what with it being proprietary and all.... Anyway, Sydney is (to be) released under the LGPL. (The "to be" part is 'cause I'm just finishing up exams, and I haven't figured out the file release tools on SourceForge yet. Everything's in CVS, though.) It provides a fairly rich class hierarchy of widgets, including normal stuff like buttons, labels, and checkboxes, plus some more complex stuff like trees and tables. It runs in both Mozilla and IE, and it's intended to be cross-browser, so now that it's open source, it may start to work in $YOUR_FAVOURITE_NON_TTY_BROWSER. Let me know what you think.
Ian
There's a very interesting post on kottke.org that discusses online applications in relation to weblogs. I quote:
.Mac account); use GMail for email; use TypeKey or Flickr's authentication system to handle identity; outsource your storage/backups to Google or Akamai; you let Feedburner "listen" for new content from all those sources,
Taking the weblog example to the extreme, you could use TypePad to write a weblog entry; Flickr to store your photos; store some mp3s (for an mp3 blog) on your ISP-hosted shell account; your events calendar on Upcoming; use iCal to update your personal calendar (which is then stored on your
transform/aggregate/filter it all, and publish it to your Web space; and you manage all this on the Web at each individual Web site or with a Watson-ish desktop client.
---- scrm
bloglines.com is an excellent replacement for your desktop RSS newsfeed aggregator. Once I started using it, I was hooked. Those desktop aggregators waste RAM, network bandwidth, and constantly bug you when there are new feed items to read. the online replacement is a definite improvement. they also have a notifier popup window via web or downloadable app for your OS if you simply must be informed of new items.
:)
I could keep raving about why it's better, but you should just try it
"What thou shalt not, I shalt did!" -Bart Simpson
I've just tried a few of those 'online' apps, they ate loads of memory and one crashed firefox, hardly the things I would expect from an 'online' app.
Instead they are just regular application embeded in a web page, woopie, I can do that with anything Java.
I was expecting the kind of thin client that I would be able to access from a mobile device, or run on a pritated copy of Crippled Windows (TM) that's been imported from Asia.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Crap. Usually when you read these "I remember when" rants they are funny because they are so over the top that you realize nobody could really think like that.
I found myself agreeing with this one. Dammit.
Gotta go chase some kids off my lawn...
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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