Web apps were always a bit difficult to get to, but this instant access without even an address bar in the browser window, really has opened up a lot potential for me.

The Old Guard

But let me take you through all that is at display. For instant messaging and file transfers, i still depend on desktop software (not sure if file transfers would ever make it into a web app…) hence the pidgin, skype, google talk, filezilla, flashget and idrive icons. Than there is  two native window icons for the desktop and the recycle bin, as well as a bleutooth icon to get images from my phone. Itunes is for syncing my ipod more than anything else. Than my most adored desktop app: notepad++: always fast loading, instant savable, and again with ftp support. But the rest is pretty much web apps.

The New Frontier

Gmail is the core of it all, Google docs help me edit documents and articles. There is still need for an actual  need for browser windows now and than. The one displayed actually opened by google docs, as the web apps can’t keep a pop-up in a web app window yet (and how would they differentiate between an app “native” link or an external?) Todist helps me see what tasks i am not doing et the moment and statcounter keeps me informed of my real time website performances. I am still figuring out what to do for an online image editor, hence the multiple icons in that field. There is a couple of the mandatory social networking sites, obviously Google Notebook to keep track of offline stuff (one of the few apps for which i miss my firefox plug-in) . As the last quick launch icon you can see Prism in which i load a additional google account.

I have to say i love my new task bar and happy that i become less depended on the operating system. The only thing that keeps me in windows is ironically apple’s itunes with last.fm plug-in to build an online library, but i might disattached from that as well….

Unconfirmed reports are circulating that GE already chose Zoho, but Oliver Marks at ZDNET set the record straight today about the claims:”For the record…no decision has been made on Google Docs, Zoho, or any other vendor at this time, but a vigorous evaluation is taking place,” he writes.

So what is Zoho? Webguild says:

Zoho is a remarkable company. They have out maneuvered all the usual suspects such as Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce at their own games. Not too long ago, the company turned down a takeover offer from Salesforce. Zoho is an example of the new Web economics at work. The company hails from India, has never taken venture funding and has a ten person operation in Silicon Valley. Yet, if you look at its suite of products you would think it has a Fortune 500 company backing it. The company employees 600 engineers, developers, product managers, and technicians in India that develop and build its products.

The basic idea of the two apps is the same: keep track of your tasks, organize them in due date, priority and category/project/tag. But the feel of the two is very different. Remember the milk is kind of quite, whileTodoist is very straightforward, very well represented n the logo of the 2 apps. Both have support for mobile phones and Remember the milk has offline support through google gears.

The crux in task lists is that it is suppose to increase your productivity and so the essential is the usability and here Todoist wins from Remember the milk. Todoist is really based on the premis of how to get your tasks organized as quickly as possible. 

For starters remember the milk does not give a comprehensible overview aff all the tasks, overdue until next year, in one glance. This gives me the idea that i might be missing something, and that is exactly what i try to avoid. 

Additionaly todoist has an extreme efficient way of adding new tasks. Although i miss an add task button on the home page, once you are in the project it is a breeze, especially the abbrivations come in handy. Like google calendar it is able to understand words as today, tomorrow or wednesday, but in addition there arequick and easy abbrevations that you can use like tom, tod etc. If the task list app is really set to be daily efficiency tool, memorizing a few intuitive abbrevations is not all that more of an effort. They come in pretty handy in the prominent search box where, once a bit used to the syntax, you can find anything in a sec.

Conclusion

Remember the milk certainly has the cuteness that could give you a smile on your face and has the ability to work offline with google gears. Todoist, however, is very basic looking, but has a more efficient usability, and that might just be what you needed.

The short of it all, you can’t do ALT-TAB between browser tabs. That means when once we could copy text from Excel, ALT-TAB and paste the text in Outlook, we can’t do the ALT-TAB trick to copy text from Google Apps and paste it in Gmail. That’s right, not even the superbrowser Chrome. Why didn’t the engineers think of it? I guess they don’t use web apps too much.

I am not sure if Michael tried the brilliant application shortcuts or lift a tab out of a window but for me it works like a charm. Alt-Tab brings me from a tab to a tab and Ctrl-Tab from an app to an app. Or did i get it wrong?

Web application Oosah hosts a whopping one terabyte (that’s 1,024 gigabytes) of media online for free. In addition to hosting videos, photos, and music you upload directly to the site, Oosah also integrates with Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, and YouTube. Once you’ve connected your accounts, you can actually drag and drop photos between webapps—so, for example, if you uploaded a photo to Oosah that you wanted to add to a Flickr set, you can just drag and drop it onto Flickr in the sidebar. 

The main thing that i didnt find is a mutliple file uploader with folder structures. Do i have to fill 1 terabyte with individual selected files? Ge! I might need a holiday.

More on Nyman’s application:

GMDesk is an application that lets you run Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Maps as a stand-alone application to do all your mail handling, calendar event reading etc with. No need to open it up in a web browser, or have it clutter your workspace.

Fire up GMDesk, and just alt-tab (on Windows or Linux) or Cmd-tab (on Mac) to shift between this application and the other ones you are running.

GMDesk offers an easy menu as well as keyboard shortcuts to switch between different Google services, and you can specify what default service you want the application to start with. It also supports Google Apps access as well.

via: Lifehacker

Zoho, which makes an online office suite of 18 apps including word processor, spreadsheet, e-mail, chat, CRM, and Web conferencing, plans a couple of upgrades in the next two weeks.

The company plans the week of Sept. 29 to introduce an online app store for its Creator service. Creator is a drag-and-drop Ajax-based, browser-based platformfor database applications. Users can build apps such as customer record management, human resources, or tracking music collections, which are hosted on Zoho’s Creator database services.

Life Hacker

If you want to edit photos in your web browser without loading Flash, Silverlight, Java, or any other heavy plug-in, check out DrPic.com, a surprisingly full-featured online image editor which works its magic completely in Javascript.

ExtremeTech.com

Picnik isn’t about trying to be an online Photoshop, but rather is intended as a way to give digital shutterbugs a convenient way to fix up their snapshots. Its competition in the installed software world is Picasa rather than Photoshop. But don’t think it’s a simple rotate and red-eye correcting app: Picnik offers plenty of impressive capabilities.

LifeHacker.com:

There’s quite a bit to Picnik, actually: you can do the basic resizes and tweaks that most other free image editors we’ve talked about here at Lifehacker can manage; however, Picnik also comes with some nifty special effects, and can be used with a whole plethora of community photo sharing sites, i.e., Flickr, Imageshack, Photobucket, etc. It’s not as powerful as Photoshop, naturally, but for a browser-based image editor, Picnik does a fine job.