I am really suprised at the number of web applications that I have started
using in just the past few months. I’ve never been a fan of web apps
(too slow, clusmy interfaces, etc.), but GMail broke the mold here and
showed the world what a good web interface could do. And I think we will
see more of that as time goes on.
Anyways, here’s what I use…
- BlogLines (bloglines.com)
- After messing around with desktop news aggregators for a while, I moved to
BlogLines to monitor all my news feeds.
It solved two problems for me: (1) the need for a cross platform news
aggregator and (2) keeping multiple workstations synced with regard to the
news already read. This is the perfect fit for web app.
- GMail (gmail.com)
- I entered the GMail race late in the game, as I was very happy with my mail
hosting on the UML Co-op system that I use. However I discovered one
problem with hosting mail on the co-op box. When the box goes down, how do
I send/receive mail on the UMLCOOP mailing list? So I broke down a got a
GMail account mainly for backup. I’ve very impressed with the clean
and responsive user interface. GMail has set the bar for all web apps in
the future.
- del.icio.us (del.icio.us)
- Yes, that’s how its spelled, and yes, that is really the host name.
Weird. But I love this site. I had heard about it for some time and never
really understood what it was all about. Then two months ago someone demoed
del.icio.us at our local Linux users group meeting. Since then I’ve
got over 400 bookmarks added to the system.
So, what is del.icio.us? It is a bookmarking web app that allows you to add
keywords to the bookmarks. For example, if I come across a great site about
programming X10 devices in Ruby, I can bookmark the site and associate the
keywords "ruby", "x10", "programming" with
the bookmark. Later I can come back and ask for all bookmarks associated
with "x10". Cool! Did you ever want to return to a site you had
visited earlier, but just can’t remember where in web it was?
Del.icio.us is a great answer to that.
And what’s more, your bookmarks are sharable. Today someone ask me
about Ruby IDE’s and I sent them to my del.icio.us bookmarks: del.icio.us/jimweirich/ide+ruby
- Ta-Da Lists (www.tadalist.com)
- I just came across this one today, and its the real reason I started this
blog entry. Wow, what a simple idea. And so beautifully executed. Notice
the lack of submit buttons. Just start typing todo list entries, hitting a
return to go to the next one. Finished a todo item and want to check it
off? Just check the box … no submit button needed to get the changes
back to the database. Ta-Da lists uses XMLHttpRequest to interact
dynamically with the host. Beautiful.
And to top it off, it is a Ruby-on-Rails application. Written in 579
lines of Ruby code, that’s less
than the size of the XML config files used in many J2EE applications.
David is really showing off the
latest features of Rails too.
Now, if I only liked todo lists …