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

Tags: application, apps, Computer, computers, database, developers, device, Discovery, email, facebook, functionality, Hardware, information, interface, Internet, iphone, linux, Mobile Devices, network, Networking, Personal, Software, Spam, system, system tray, type, web, web application, web applications, widgets, Windows, XP

Linux doesn’t have a CEO. Consequently, there’s no annual keynote hosted by a charismatic alpha male. But if it did, and if there were a conference covering the first half of this year, the first speech would start with three words: ‘Linux is winning’.

Firstly, a market research firm in the US called The NPD Group revealed that sales of Google’s Android platform overtook those of Apple’s iPhone in the first quarter of 2010, propelling itself into second place behind the waning RIM. Android is becoming increasingly competitive, spanning both the smartphone and the emerging tablet markets, with devices from Dell and HP on the near horizon. This might be why Apple has started a patent infringement lawsuit against HTC, using many of its Android-based phones as physical exhibits in its litigation.

Secondly, Google announced its intention to open source the VP8 video codec. This was acquired when it bought On2 earlier in the year and it will be used alongside Vorbis and the MKV container to create Google’s WebM video format. This is vitally important for Linux. The nascent H.264 format, as used by Apple and many HTML5 video streams, is encumbered by patents, and current open-source implementations live under the shadow of legislation. VP8 and WebM have the potential to match it for quality, and while WebM will undoubtedly attract similar litigious trouble, having an umbrella the size of Google should satisfy many Linux distributions, especially when Mozilla, Opera and Adobe have already pledged their support.

Finally, the UK’s new coalition government has published its Programme for Government. There are two points in the section on Transparency that are great news for free software. One states, “We will create a level playing field for open-source software,” while the other adds, “We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.” If these promises come true, it will transform attitudes to open-source software and Linux, and hopefully open the door for its use within government and schools, two areas where it’s ideal.

Many of us used to think that for Linux to be judged a success, it had to be installed and running on more desktop computers than Microsoft Windows. And there are great swathes of Linux users who still feel the same way. But the world of computing has changed. There’s more than one way of judging the success of something that started as just a good idea.

Windows, Linux and OS X are survivors. They’ve lasted this long because they exist within their own ecosystems. Linux, for example, is fed by a curious mixture of enterprise investment, embedded hardware vendors and a community brimming full of zealous commitment. There’s a low-cost threshold to entry and a subsystem that maintains itself with very little investment. It’s these factors that have shaped how it looks, how it feels and how it’s operated.

The ecosystems inhabited by both Microsoft and Apple are equally well-adapted to their environments. The former is the domain of the utilitarians, offering straight functionality for an up-front price. The latter is an increasingly important fusion of fashion and function. But things have changed. The borders between the ecosystems have become indistinct. Apple has surpassed Microsoft in market value, winning thousands of new fans through it’s no-fuss interfaces and lower prices. There’s a shift in the balance of power.

And thanks to Google, Linux is becoming less free and less open, proving that in the new markets where it’s having the most commercial success, it’s becoming more like Apple. ROMs are encrypted and need to be rooted for user-hacking, third-party applications have to be sold through a single vendor and personal information is held in the cloud by a sole provider. If Linux wants a taste of similar success, it might find it if it makes similar concessions to a user’s freedom.

But then we’d have failed. The Linux ecosystem would have become too polluted, bogged down by sponsored kernel additions, paid-for support and short life cycles. It may be a commercial success, but no longer an active one. Our hypothetical CEO might make further compromises, and make judgements against the interest of Linux users. Which is exactly why we don’t have a CEO, and exactly why the success of open-source software is so difficult to judge using the same language as its competitors.

Tags: Apple, application, ceo, Computer, computers, Computing, desktop, device, embedded, Environment, functionality, google, Hardware, implementation, implementations, information, interface, iphone, linux, microsoft, Microsoft Windows, patent, Patents, Personal, Research, sla, Software, system, third parties, web, Windows

This model was created by Andrew Comb. It took six years to model in Lightwave 3D, and has a total of nine million polygons.

Once upon a time, a handful of pixels madeth the space invader. Graphics were iconic, not representative: a picture on the box or manual showed you what it was meant to look like, and your mind filled in the necessary gaps. Nobody could have predicted that in just 20 years, we’d be immersing ourselves in realistic living cities, flying over gorgeous tropical islands and going head-to-head with astoundingly rendered characters – and not even being particularly impressed. But in years to come, modern games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Crysis will look just as dated as the classics we remember from the days of yore. In fact, they’ll probably look more so: while the simplicity of a retro game’s look has a certain charm to it, old 3D titles tend to flat-out look old. Try almost any hit game of the mid-to-late ’90s for proof of that.

3D is about more than just pretty graphics. Done right, it makes gameworlds come alive. A 2D sprite can only do what it’s been drawn to do, while a 3D character has a complete endoskeleton and can respond naturally (at least in theory) to anything that happens – the classic example being ‘ragdolls’, where a fallen enemy doesn’t simply slump to the ground in a canned animation, but tumbles off the railing and lands with one arm draped over a step.

You can create worlds rather than merely levels, unlocking the player’s ability to truly explore and experience the world as the character would. You can build simulations ready to be poked and prodded, abused and enjoyed.

It’s phenomenally powerful, to the point that many nominally 2D games are now really 3D ones viewed from a locked perspective, so that they can better use the possibilities of animation, physics and art assets. Why render hundreds of frames of animation you may not be happy with when you can make a model and keep tweaking it until it’s perfect? You may lose some of the old-school charm, but you gain far more.

Dawn of a dimension

The first big 3D success was Battlezone, a tank game released in 1980 that used vector graphics to create its work, much like Asteroids. While a simple game by modern standards, it was fiendishly complex for such an early example, offering the ability to go anywhere in an (admittedly featureless) world, hide from attacks and fight enemies.

Battlezone was thought to be so realistic that the US Army used it to train tank gunners.

Not impressive enough? In 1987, the first Freescape game, Driller, hit the shelves. It offered a full 3D world on platforms as basic as the Spectrum, and was an actual game rather than just a tech demo. Next to that, it didn’t matter that it was ugly, the frame-rate was abysmal and the game itself wasn’t actually much fun – it got lots of attention.

The Freescape engine in its various forms was used in several famous releases, including Castle Master and its sequel, and the all-out 3D Construction Kit. Legend has it that someone somewhere once made something other than a surreal, unplayable mess in this, but we never saw it. Freescape also made it onto TV, in the form of the absolutely atrocious Craig Charles vehicle Cyberzone, one of the most toe-curling attempts at creating a games-related TV show ever. Thankfully, all that remains of it is a single YouTube clip – and that’s painful enough. Most of the early 3D games stuck to simpler technologies. These days, we think of 3D as free-roaming, real-time engines, but back in the day, simply getting a game to look 3D was impressive. As early as 1981, games were achieving this feat – 3D Monster Maze was terrifying a generation with its slowly updating screens and roaming T-Rex, and the first Ultima game was offering a very advanced hybrid of block-by-block movement 3D graphics for its dark dungeons alongside a top-
down 2D overworld for exploration.

Interestingly, while most developers kept pushing further towards 3D, Ultima ended up pulling back, switching entirely to a top-down sprite-based system for the series’ glory days. The 3D element later developed into its own spin-off – the Ultima Underworld games – before returning for the series’ sadly disappointing final outing – the buggy, system-murdering Ultima IX: Ascension.

Faking it

The problem has always been the same: the potential of 3D fights with the limitations of current systems, whether it’s simply displaying the graphics in the first place or making them look as good as other art styles. Going back to an early ’90s 3D game now is almost painful. Flat faces, non-moving lips during conversations, stick-figure character models, smeary textures and appalling animation… the list of problems goes on. Some games got past this, sometimes bizarrely – most obviously Core Design’s legendary heroine Lara Croft, who managed to become an international sex symbol despite looking like a pointy-chested Pinocchio. Most survived simply because playing a 3D game felt futuristic, even if the lack of polygons our PCs could push out meant that 2D games were usually much more detailed.

For much of 3D’s history, the trick has been getting the effect of the third dimension without having to do it for real. The early Wing Commander games gave the illusion that you were flying through 3D space, but really they were just scaling sprites up and down. In first-person shooters, it quickly became clear that walls were easy thanks to their incredibly simple geometry, but snarling hellbeasts dripping blood from their fangs were asking a bit too much. So developers compromised. The worlds themselves were made in 3D, initially just as mazes. Then, as texturing became more advanced, more realistic-looking areas were created, like those in Catacomb 3D.

Interestingly, the state of the art varied dramatically across genres. Shooters had to be fast and fluid, so they were kept simple. In the case of early games like Core Design’s Corporation, things were stripped down so much that the engine didn’t even bother with textures. Id’s first breakout hit – Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 – had textures to depict the inside of its supposed Nazi castle stronghold, but all the maps were completely flat and the interaction was limited to just opening doors and shooting enemies. Ultima Underworld, which came out in the same year, had sloped surfaces, advanced lighting effects, dialogue, puzzles, magic systems, physics, 3D objects, a real plot, the ability to look up and down instead of having your view locked straight ahead and much more.

Ultima Underworld could afford to push these limits because as a role-playing game, it was inherently slower than a shooter, and the audience was more willing to accept the necessary limitations, like the small viewing window. It didn’t hurt that while publisher Origin’s official motto was ‘We Create Worlds’, its unofficial credo was ‘Your PC Will Cry’. It never did worry about system requirements…

Two and a half dimensions

For performance and sales reasons, most games were stuck in what was dubbed 2.5D until the launch of Quake in 1996. Quake wasn’t the first genuinely full-3D shooter in the modern style, but it was the one that made 2.5D officially obsolete. These faux 3D or 2.5D games were flat maps, where areas could be raised and lowered (and in later games like Duke Nukem 3D, sloped), but you couldn’t have one room on top of another. Some games pretended otherwise, but it was generally a trick – the player would be silently teleported as they crossed the room’s threshold. Descent provided a full 3D world made up of polygons in 1995, but only a basic one – it was a series of sprawling mineshafts. The Star Wars game Dark Forces offered rooms above rooms, but otherwise stuck to the standard technologies on display in any other shooter of its era, including sprites.

First-person shooter bosses like this were unheard of before Quake was released in 1996. Now, they’re standard issue.

Sprites were a growing problem. By the mid ’90s, level design was getting more and more impressive. By modern standards, the opening cinema level in Duke Nukem Forever is empty and unconvincing, but to an audience used to bland military base corridors and castles, the realism was incredible.

Almost all these games were able to do this because they saved their 3D for the world. Actual characters were pre-drawn 2D images, pasted in to the game. Not only did they increasingly look weak, not part of the scenery and incredibly blocky up-close, but they also didn’t fit. Games could scale sprites to deal with the player getting closer to and further away from them, but when they started offering the ability to look up and down (first made popular with Heretic, a 1994 fantasy game) the effect showed its limits, with sprites shearing and increasingly looking like the cardboard cutouts they were.

A little voodoo magic

Games had to get more advanced, but the performance wasn’t there. Quake brought full-3D worlds and enemies to the field in 1996, but at the cost of visuals. Technically, they were better, and the improvement in animation was stunning – an early sequence where a snarling Fiend leaps out of a door to attack the player directly is one of many gamers’ fondest memories, to say nothing of the first episode’s room-
sized, lava-throwing monster Cthon. But the world was still drab, ugly and simplistic, with enemies that looked like they’d been knocked into shape with a sledgehammer and textures that would have lowered the tone in a morgue. Like all graphics technology, this quickly improved over the next few years, but it was increasingly obvious that simply throwing more CPU power at games wasn’t going to cut it.

Not alone, anyway

Most people didn’t really see the need for dedicated video cards at first because, to put it bluntly, there wasn’t much of one. Games increasingly offered a high-end mode that offered a higher resolution and additional effects without a specific need for extra hardware – bar a hefty processor. This high-end mode slowly became the standard experience, yet it was a long time before video cards became mandatory for playing PC games. Even technical showpieces like the original Unreal would run in so-called ‘software mode’. There wasn’t one big game that marked the transition, more a slow giving into inevitability.

Dedicated 3D cards came into their own around 1997, with several competing, mutually incompatible brands fighting it out for dominance. By far the most successful was 3DFX with its Voodoo cards. Even now, with built-in low-end 3D a standard on motherboards, a separate 3D card is mandatory for most games. On the plus side, the dominance of DirectX means that you don’t need to worry too much about which card to buy.

Individually, the abilities offered by 3D cards don’t sound too exciting. In the late ’90s, the core functions were transformation, clipping and lighting – in short, getting the card to work out where items in the world were and how they should be lit. The next big advance was the addition of shaders. Shaders are additional calculations thrown into the rendering pipeline that work on individual pixels, vertices and pieces of geometry to add effects and change the final image. Examples include working out appropriate shadows, making a flag flutter or adding bump mapping (a texture that gives the illusion of raised and lowered areas on an object without the need to add polygons). More advanced shaders include motion blur and bloom effects, soft shadows, depth of field and volumetric lighting.

The new bottlenecks

With the technology burden eased (or at least partly passed onto the card manufacturers), developers could focus on making the most of what they had. Valve largely pioneered skeletal-based characters rather than keyframe-by-keyframe animated enemies in Half-Life, and Ritual went out of its way to create interactive elements such as hackable computers in the real-
world environments of Half-Life’s closest rival of the time, Sin. Ragdolls spread to every new game until the games that didn’t offer them felt stodgy and ancient in comparison. Most importantly, the new realism of these games finally let developers sink their teeth into genres that they’d never have been able to do as traditional corridor shooters. Grand Theft Auto III gave us a living city. A million games brought the horrors of World War II to life in glorious cinematic style.

Realistic character and facial animation is a surprisingly recent addition to gaming.

Problem solved? No, just replaced. Now the issue became one of creating all this in the first place. A simple maze-based 3D shooter could be churned out in under a year by a competent team, but building cities, battlefields and other real-world elements requires an immense number of assets. Games are much shorter than they used to be, not because they’re more complicated – in most cases, the features are more advanced but the thinking is more conservative – because of the amount of content required, and the cost of making it. There are shortcuts for some things, like the Speedtree libraries for procedurally generating a forest in a hurry (used in, among many others, Grand Theft Auto IV, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3), but in general, if a developer wants something, that developer has to make it himself.

Crysis 2 is the current state of the art: explore New York in the wake of an alien invasion.

Technology itself has also reached a plateau, not because there’s nothing more to do – nobody thinks that – but because right now, the big money is on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Both are relatively old machines, but that doesn’t matter. PC ports often allow for higher resolutions and sometimes let you switch on better graphics (Metro 2033 looks much better for instance, as will Crysis 2 when it lands) but it’s usually a token gesture. To put the graphical difference into context, many PlayStation 3 games don’t even use anti-aliasing to smooth out the edges of their polygons, and games on both platforms typically render at a lower resolution than the high-def numbers you’d expect from the systems’ marketing.

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