Desktop vs Webtop Applications

As a starving student I have come to love the advent of Web 2.0, the rise of web based productivity applications and the wonderful world of betas. All the interesting, and free, applications piling up in my RSS reader put a gleam in my eye. They have heralded all my attention away from the confines of the classical desktop approach. Instead of forking over all my meal plan to Bill Gates, I use the Zoho productivity suite. And with a simple and FREE sign up Zoho allows a substitute for everything from word to Excel to PowerPoint.

Now this isn’t a plug for Zoho, as much as it is a ploy to drag you away from the borders of your desktop. ThinkFree is another productivity suite that does much of what Zoho accomplishes with an almost too friendly feel of Microsoft Office. Continuing to step out of the bounds of your desktop and beyond the basic word processors or spreadsheet programs there are a multitude of other free web based applications that can and will help your everyday routine.

Gliffy and Bubbl.us gives you the power of mind mapping and systematically plotting your ideas.

KeepVault and Mediamax allow for 25 gigs or online storage for papers, ebooks, videos, or music.

BigContacts is Ajax based and is a great way to store all your contacts in one place.

Skrbl is basically a electronic white board enabling you to write down your thoughts or draw something interesting.

MyStickies lets you go sticky note crazy all over the web and mark what you think is most important.

Instacalc is a great visual and sharable calculator that has the ability to create specialized graphs.

ContactOffice and Desktoptwo are an example of where we are headed with the whole webtop phenomenon and are actually a browser based desktop.

These are but a few of the hundreds of free web based applications to help the poor and less fortunate like myself, the poor college student, thrive in a world ruled by the almighty dollar. It is no longer necessary to go to your local best buy and have teen A, B, or C try to solve all your problems with a set of magically expensive software to which you, the typical user, will never touch a fraction of the features that that particular software has to offer.

And the best part about web based applications is that you can access them from any computer, given they are connected to the web. You don’t need to haul your laptop with you on your expeditions across town or campus, just sign into your account on a different computer. It is truly a wonderful world of flexibility that the web is offering these days and unless your a cubical conifer there isn’t any need to rely on the classical approach to getting things done.