I saw an online Minesweeper replacement somewhere. Only worked with Mozilla, though.

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!

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.

you just spent 5 minutes making the online text to speech tool say dumb stuff like 'all your base are belong to us'.

I want an online replacement for my web browser. Even Firefox takes too much memory on my PC.

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 [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].

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

you demonstrated the greatest flaw of online apps:
They depend on a running server. These just died. ;-/

The Google Calculator [google.com]

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 [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)

you are a very easy person to please. Its not really a replacement for anything.

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!

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.

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...

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.

http://www.horde.org/projects.php

These guys have great webmail(Imp) ; nice web based file managers (Gollem); a nice CVS viewer.

From their FAQ [horde.org]

Horde is both a piece of software and a project. The Horde Project comprises a set of Web-based productivity, messaging, and project-management applications, each of which is described below. The Horde Framework is a common code-base used by Horde applications, including libraries and a common user interface.

The Horde Framework doesn't do anything on its own; as a user, you will always be interacting with a Horde-based application.

"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.

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 [gskinner.com] 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?

A comprehensive directory of web applications can be found here [pricelesswarehome.org] (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 [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

Oh my God, they totally forgot the killer app [barbie.com]!

I hear that the website over at http://slashdot.org is a great online replacement for actual work.

Mindterm's Java-based SSH client is perfect for when you can't or don't want to install PuTTY on a public Windows machine and still need SSH access to a remote machine.

The SSH client is widely available from various sources, particularly universities. Just Google for "mindterm ssh" [google.com] 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.

...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.

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

There's a very interesting post [kottke.org] on kottke.org [kottke.org] that discusses online applications in relation to weblogs. I quote:

Taking the weblog example to the extreme, you could use TypePad [typepad.com] to write a weblog entry; Flickr [flickr.com] to store your photos; store some mp3s (for an mp3 blog) on your ISP-hosted shell account; your events calendar on Upcoming [upcoming.org]; use iCal to update your personal calendar (which is then stored on your .Mac account); use GMail [gmail.com] for email; use TypeKey [typekey.com] or Flickr's authentication system to handle identity; outsource your storage/backups to Google or Akamai [akamai.com]; you let Feedburner [feedburner.com] "listen" for new content from all those sources,
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 [karelia.com] desktop client.

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.