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?"

Simpy.com for bookmarks

[otisg]

Does a browser count as a desktop app?

If it does, then Simpy [simpy.com] is definitely a superior online replacement for bookmarks (really more than bookmarks, but let's keep it at that). Here is a demo [simpy.com] and some screen shots [simpy.com].

It's Usenet, not Google Groups

[Anthony]

What is the Internet coming to? It's like saying "Hotmail" is "Internet Mail" and "The WWW" is "The Internet".

SalesForce.com

[ron_ivi]

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.

Basecamp project management

[Peter Cooper]

BaseCamp [basecamphq.com] 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!

Of course, I don't have a paid up BaseCamp membership since I think it's overpriced, but there you go :-) (This is one benefit of regular desktop software)

Re:Its Usenet not google groups.

[daeley]

Perhaps the poster was demonstrating Google Groups as a replacement for a desktop newsreader app. ;)

reminds me of

[asv108]

"Corel Java Office" [javaworld.com]

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.

Text to Speech

[adjusting]

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.

Check out XDesktop for Open office

[Chuck Bucket]

I've been following this lately, it seems that the Open Office folks are working with the XDesktop movement- api: Interface XDesktop [openoffice.org]. 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

Re:Is it me?

[White Shadow]

I agree, public online applications shouldn't be used for sensitive data. That's why webnote [aypwip.org] is open sourced under the BSD license. If you want to make private notes or have something that you're locally accountable for, you can run it on your own server and use SSL or whatever.

Additionally, that's one of the reasons I provide an RSS feed. You can easily save a local backup of your notes.

Tony

Re:Text to Speech App

[fejikso]

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.

Security Holes

[Anonymous Coward]

That web note one lets you enter arbitrary HTML and JavaScript. So you can steal peoples cookies if that site sets any. Sweet...

Re:The best one...

[AKAImBatman]

The Google Calculator rules! There aren't many places you can type (6.09e12 * 130000) * (365 * 24 * 60 * 60) / 3.99e17 [google.com] and actually get the correct answer! And it even does better than most Scientific calculators by converting just about any measurement to any other measurement. (For example, 1 horsepower to watts [google.com].)

New SourceForge project

[ispeters]

Plug warning: I'm the project admin

Go check out the Sydney [sourceforge.net] project. There's an example at http://sydney.sourceforge.net/sydney_example.html [sourceforge.net].

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