Mashed Articles

Online apps let you become more productive on the move, doing away with software installation entirely.

Thanks to the ubiquity of internet access, web-based applications are taking off like never before. Beyond the realms of Twitter and Facebook lurks a fresh and vibrant world of online software that’s designed to run anywhere on our connected planet.

As the distinction between computers, mobile devices and the internet continues to blur, web applications are coming into their own, becoming globally important services. These are sites that do one useful thing and do it well.

But sites promoting applications have been around for donkey’s years, you might say. What’s the difference between a web app and an application that’s available for download on the web? Well, web apps are applications that run over the internet. So unlike the free utilities hosted on Sourceforge or similar, there’s no download, installation or configuration to carry out, nor hours of frustration to endure while you try to find the right libraries to compile them. Just point your browser at the relevant website and it will do the rest.

Outside of the box

Freed from the restrictions of an operating system’s windowing subsystem, software designers can allow their imaginations to run riot. Interfaces that owe more to high-tech thrillers than to Windows, Linux or Mac OS X are beginning to appear. Also emerging are more intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces that require at most a few seconds of exploration to get you going. Software use is slowly evolving and becoming as much about discovery and experimentation as it used to be about reading manuals and clicking options.

In this special roundup, we bring you 10 cool web apps that all share these traits. It’s a diverse bunch, ranging from future essentials to those that you’ll need infrequently. They all exhibit the sort of rich functionality that is beginning to appear through the medium of web browsers, and remove the need to download and install an application suite. If you want something, it’s probably already been written, and so we’ve also included a site that will help you to find other incredible web applications. Happy browsing!

Newsmap

Newsmap is a global news aggregator site like no other, and it’s almost guaranteed to get people peering over your shoulder as you use it. The app presents a page covered in blocks of different sizes. Each represents a story, coloured by subject. Newsmap takes input from news feeds and then gives the stories that are more prominent bigger boxes on-screen, a little like a tag cloud. Simply move your mouse over a story to see its details and a link to the original article.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Instapaper

Instapaper is a way of bookmarking long web pages so that you can read them when you have time later on. The URLs are stored in Instapaper’s central database, so you can access them from anywhere. A range of iPhone apps support it, as does the Kindle, making it flexible and a great way of keeping hold of interesting things to read on long journeys. To use Instapaper, drag and drop the ‘Read Later’ icon onto your toolbar. When you subsequently find a page you want to save, just click the icon.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Lovely Charts

There are plenty of times when you need access to some good chart-drawing software for just half an hour. However, it’s usually supplied as part of a far larger application. Lovely Charts is different. It’s a free web app that creates some very lovely charts indeed. After signing up and creating a new document, you simply drag and drop symbols and connectors from a range of predefined types to create the chart you want – anything from a simple flowchart to a complex route map.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Bing Visual Search

Bing’s Visual Search capability is still in beta, but it’s already showing promise as a new way to search the expanding universe of information out there. On the main Bing page, click the ‘Visual Search’ link. Search categories are organised into galleries, and everything is point-and-click. Instead of typing in your search term, you simply click the relevant picture. The list of galleries is still small, but it’s an interesting glimpse of what could be to come.

PC Plus Verdict: 3.5/5

Fonolo

Calling Fonolo a work of genius is perhaps a little strong, but if you’re heartily sick of wading through phone menus to talk to a human being then it probably comes close. Fonolo walks you through company phone systems to find a human voice. If a company isn’t listed, you can add your own, and test the service by calling special test hardware set up by the developers. Ideal for Skype users, Fonolo’s is also available for the iPhone, which should see its popularity rise further.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Netvibes

Netvibes allows you to create what it calls a dashboard for your interests. Unlike a simple RSS feed reader, the app has a large number of widgets that present feeds from your favourite sites in a highly editable form, making it very customisable. Netvibes is also partly a social-networking service. People can follow you and read your public page if their interests are the same as yours. For the sake of privacy, you can also set up a private page with feeds that only you can see.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Floor Planner

People are crazy about home improvement at the moment, but good, free planning software is hard to find. The free version of Floor Planner allows you to create a plan, make specific rooms and then decide where to place the windows, doors and any of a large number of items of furniture. You can inspect your work in 3D from any angle to see exactly how your ideal home would look. You can then save your work and send it straight to your architect – easy peasy!

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Wakoopa

The brainchild of Dutch founders Wouter Broekhof and Robert Gaal, Wakoopa is a social-networking site that is designed to help its users discover new web apps and other software they might enjoy. It does so by first searching for people that use the same apps and installed software as you do. It then finds the software they use but you don’t, and which they rate highly. These it recommends to you. But how does Wakoopa know what software you and others use? A downloadable tracker monitors the sites you visit and the installed applications you use.

Every 15 minutes, it sends this information to your Wakoopa profile for those on your contacts list to take a look at. When your contacts search for new apps, this information is cross-matched with their own to generate a selection of software recommendations picked especially for them.

It’s a simple idea, and one that lets you explore an ever-expanding universe of web apps and installable applications and utilities without ever having to spend hours scouring the web for information – plus you know that none of the programs will turn out to be malware.

Explore and amaze

Once the tracker is installed, right-clicking on the Wakoopa icon in the system tray enables you to suggest a new application that others may like to try. To keep the underlying database free of spam, any suggestions you make that aren’t either installed apps or something that runs in your browser will not be accepted.

When you find a particularly intriguing application in Wakoopa that you’ve never heard of before, clicking on its symbol opens a page giving its details, alternatives that you might like to try and – perhaps most importantly – both good and bad comments from its existing users. This enables you to quickly make decisions about whether to use the app without the frustration of downloading and installing it, only to later discover that it’s not for you.

As well as relying on custom recommendations generated via your contacts list, you can also use the Wakoopa search box to simply enter an application field, making software experimentation as easy and hassle-free as it could ever possibly be.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

RescueTime

You’re in the middle of writing an important email but the right words won’t come, so you decide to spend a couple of minutes reading your friends’ statuses on Facebook to clear your head. By the time you’re finished, you fancy having a look at what the celebrities on Twitter are up to. News doesn’t read itself, so it’s off to the RSS feeds next, stopping on the way back to drop by a hobby forum. Armed with more coffee after posting a detailed rebuttal of another forum member’s argument, it’s time to check Facebook again for any replies, and perhaps to glance at Twitter again to make sure that Stephen Fry hasn’t unexpectedly returned. What began as a break to clear your head has somehow blossomed into over an hour of wasted time.

With so many cool new web apps appearing, distractions can only get worse. Some are great for getting things done, but without that vital pinch of self-control, we risk becoming ever busier while paradoxically achieving far less. RescueTime promises to show you how you spend your time online, and also to help you develop the increasingly important skill of self-control.

After installing a Data Collector plug-in, you tell RescueTime the three most distracting and three most productive things you do online. Data Collector then logs the time you spend using your local apps as well as the websites you visit, and can even monitor which of your browser tabs is active. You can also tell it to ignore the time you spend away from the PC so that you get an accurate view of your working day.

Once the Data Collector plug-in has gathered enough data, you can go to your RescueTime account and view detailed reports containing information on everything from the sites you visit to how efficiently you use your time based on how you categorise your activities.

The personal Solo Lite version of the service is free. The paid-for Solo Pro edition ($6 to $9 a month) allows you to block unproductive websites when you visit them too much, and alerts you when Data Collector notices you’re spending too much time dodging work. But you don’t need to splash out: the free service provides a fascinating insight, and helps you to learn a skill that will surely become as essential as using a search engine.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Feeling lonely on the internet is an odd sensation, but a survey from last month suggests it’s a growing problem. At the click of a mouse, you can connect with millions of people – and not just random members of the smelly flesh-army that is humanity, but people who share your interests, actually want to talk and may even type ‘LOL’ at your jokes.

It’s just not the same though. A whopping 60 per cent of tech-savvy people aged 18 to 35 are apparently complaining of often feeling lonely, as opposed to just 35 per cent of the traditionally isolated over-55s. This is the age group for whom services like Facebook have supposedly done wonders for staying in touch.

Obviously, all surveys of this ilk should be taken with a pinch of salt capable of melting a glacier, but this one wouldn’t surprise me. For starters, if you’re feeling down, sometimes a social service is the last thing you want to be plugged into. Either you’re one click away from seeing what a much better day everyone you know is having, whether they’re splashing on the beach or preparing for a party you’d have been blissfully unaware of not having been invited to, or it’s the interactive equivalent of a grey weekend in Norwich – everyone complaining of how much they’re sitting around in the rain, breaking up with their former loved ones, drowning in a treacle sea of underpaid work and just generally having a lousy epoch.

It’s a wider issue than just Facebook, though. Take gaming. Back in the day, you had just one console and friends would come round to play things like Mario Kart with you on a split-screen display. People would get together for LAN parties and head to cybercafés. Now, multiplayer gaming’s primarily done online, with players sitting alone and communicating on headphones. Not only are we separated by distance, we’re separated by our characters. Nobody ever called their friend ‘Yoshi’ during a Mario Kart race, but play something like World of Warcraft and if it’s not a character name you go by, you simply become ‘the tank’ or ‘the mage’ – just one cog out of 25.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule. Rock Band is a great example of a game where people still get together to play, as are a number of Wii games. In general though, as online games get more social, they’re getting lonelier. Even lonelier than single-player games in many ways, thanks to providing a weak, unsatisfying experience rather than an alternative. Social networking is increasingly following suit, with the sheer volume of content spewing out of the pipes. Recently, it’s just mass shouting. Nobody really cares what your Spotify playlists are, any more than clicking a Facebook ‘Like’ button can replace actually telling someone that you liked something. That’s not to say that these things can’t be useful in their own right – ‘Like’ buttons are fine for highlighting new content you might not otherwise have seen (seeing that someone’s watching a new show is good for remembering that it’s on), but it’s not so much social as a replacement for it. The lack of effort means that people are sharing more, but also that it doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s the online equivalent of the ubiquitous ‘Alright, mate?’

One of the most surprising things about all this social interaction is how little it focuses on actual real-world connections, especially given the sheer weight of information in the much-ballyhooed social graphs everyone wants to build up. Take online dating for instance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg claims that by looking at online profiles, he can tell who’s going to hook up with whom, which is a good trick. Yet still Facebook lacks any real service that skips the usual questionnaires and glorified personal adverts in favour of just looking at your data and interests and saying ‘You, call You’. Foursquare focuses on checking into places and sharing that information, but only as far as making up silly games about mayors and meeting up with existing friends, not trying expand your real-life social network by suggesting: ‘Why not say hello to these people next time you’re there.’

There are so many things that social networking could offer if it focused more on the social side: actually meeting people and doing things, instead of just building endless lists of friends you hardly see any more. As it is, it’s providing endless ways of keeping us trapped at our PCs, making sure that our music choices and profile pictures say what we want them to, and that no friends will mock us for having an overgrown Farmville. No wonder so many of us are feeling lost in the cloud.

As you may have noticed, PC Plus is now on Facebook. Join us, and you’ll get all the latest site updates delivered straight to you, wherever you are. Of course, our Twitter feed and RSS feed aren’t going anywhere – it’s just one more way we’re trying to deliver the content you want to read, in whatever form you find most comfortable. If there’s anything else you’d like the Facebook page to offer, let us know at the usual address.

Click here to join, or click the Like button in the sidebar.