Posts Tagged
cloud
Here at Web.Appstorm, we’ve written about a number of brilliant web apps. Some of them I use everyday, and many have become a part of my work flow and are of great use to me. The Internet is much like this, full of great apps that can help you with nearly anything you’d ever need help with. What if you want to add to the Internets great arsenal of tools orwealth of information by building your own site?
The answer to this could well be Handcraft. In essence, it’s an online text editor, though it’s a lot more than this in practice. It can become your whole web development work flow and backup setup in one. Handcraft started out as a prototyping tool, designed to let you build your sites directly in the browser, for the browser, rather than starting out in Photoshop. Let’s see if this is the tool you need to design your next great site.
Data and vendor lock in is one of the few things that are holding back a lot of people from jumping the cloud bandwagon. When you are running a native enterprise app from behind your own firewall, there are so many ways to export or backup all your data. In fact, that is one of the major selling points of enterprise software behemoths who are running for covers since the cloud onslaught.
To a large extent, this is actually true. For any reason, if Google bumps me off my personal Gmail or Google Apps account, I’m done for good. Apps like Backupify are a ray of hope and now ShuttleCloud is a new tool that can help you keep your data safe by switching it to a new web app account. After the break, I’m going to take you through the steps to help facilitate a smooth migration of your data.
For over a year now, I have been trying hard to push every reader of this blog (and whoever I talk to) to embrace the cloud. It goes without saying that I use a lot of web apps to carry out my personal and professional day to day activities. But in reality, it’s a mix of web and native apps combined (about 75% and 25% of each respectively). Not that web apps aren’t capable of pulling out all the tasks that I do, but native apps offer a bit of flexibility in some cases.
But guess what, last week I got caught up in a unforeseen situation, I had to get away from my beloved desktop for a couple of days. I had access to Internet cafes, but that’s all I got to complete my assignments before deadlines. I did make it in time. Care to know how I pulled it off with the help of web apps alone?
If you are using the Internet, there is absolutely no chance you aren’t using cloud storage. Knowingly or unknowingly, your data is stored in a remote server waiting to be accessed from any device you choose to use. And if you are someone like me, you likely use a whole bunch of cloud services to do one thing or the other. From invoicing, email to getting things done and composing this very article, I depend on the cloud for a huge portion of my computing life.
It’s a conscious choice, and over the couple of years I have willfully reduced my dependency on local storage. Over the course of the day, I have to open and close a lot of apps to get work done. I’d would love to avoid that. Otixo is a web app that creates a centralized place to access all files stored in the cloud across all of your storage services, letting you move files seamlessly between, say, Google Docs and Dropbox. That sounds like an app that most of us could use today, with a growing number of files saved on dozens of apps across the web.
We all love our desktop computers. The comfortable keyboard and mouse combination coupled with a large screen display beats out a laptop or tablet every single time. However, the nature of our work takes us to a variety of places with no desktop or a completely different setup than what we are used to.
Web apps solve this problem in a second. There aren’t many desktop apps that don’t have a worthy competitor online. As is our tradition, we have compiled a list of web apps that give their desktop equivalents run for their money. Follow me after the jump to check out which apps made the list and if you don’t find a bunch apps you like here, try our earlier roundups.
Apple is set to debut iCloud sometime over the next couple months, their fourth try at cloud-based services after iTools, .Mac and MobileMe. iCloud will feature some pretty major changes to Apple’s software lineup, mainly centring around the syncing of data between devices and iCloud.com. Although the lineup of iCloud services is radically different from MobileMe, the premise is the same: “Exchange, for the rest of us”.
However, I put forward that iCloud is, in fact, a completely different use of the cloud. This isn’t bad, and may actually be a more preferential one for the reasons I’m about to set forward. Change isn’t always bad, and in the realm of cloud data, Apple is pushing an interesting new precedent.
Anyone who works in a business will know how important collaboration is on a project. It allows you to work more effectively by knowing exactly who is doing what and can save business time and, most importantly, money. In today’s world, which revolves around technology and the Internet, project management has moved from those old-fashioned paper Gantt charts pinned up on the noticeboard around work to the virtual world of silicon chips and cloud-based computing.
There’s so many project managers, and yet most seem to be the same old system with a slightly different design. Then there’s Pivotal Tracker, an app that takes a fully unique approach to managing projects the agile way.
Computers are interesting devices. They’re easily one of the most influential inventions mankind has ever produced, and are crucial to almost everything we do today. From smartphones to tablets to Google’s massive servers around the globe, computers come in all shapes and sizes and are used for a mind-boggling array of tasks.
What sets apart computers from the wheel, hammer, engine, and other major inventions of humanity is the varied ways a computer can be put to use. They can calculate the amount of fuel needed to get to the moon, animate characters and render picture-perfect landscapes, and let you talk with friends around the globe. Computers don’t do this on their own, though. The special thing is the software or apps that run on them. Without software, computers are simply black boxes.
So what makes one type of software different from another? Why would you choose web apps over native applications, and why does it really matter?
Last week at Apple’s annual WWDC, Steve Jobs took the stage during the keynote address to unveil Apple’s latest product: iCloud. The successor of .Mac and MobileMe, iCloud was pitched as the unifier between Apple’s disparate computing devices: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Macs. With it, your data would be accessible anytime, no matter which of your devices you’re using.
After giving an initial description of the service, Jobs went on to describe the his views on files and the cloud around 82 minutes into the keynote:
Now some people think the cloud is just a hard disk in the sky, right? And you take a bunch of stuff, and you put it in your Dropbox or your iDisk or whatever, and it transfers it up to the cloud and stores it. Then you drag whatever you want back out and store it on your devices.
We think it’s way more than that, and we call it iCloud.
~ Steve Jobs, June 6, 2011
It was not too long ago that Google announced their cloud based music player, Music beta by Google. After using Amazon’s Cloud Player for a while, I was excited to see what Google had to offer. I am after all, an Android user and I border on Google fanboydom. While I think the coup de gras of Music beta is tight Android integration, I decided to take a close look at the web app as a music player, much like I did for Amazon Cloud Player. Here’s what I found.
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