Top 5 Lesser Known Web Apps
These days, it’s pretty rare to find somebody who doesn’t have at least one Web app that they couldn’t live without. I know I’d struggle to get by without my beloved Gmail, Google Reader and Flickr. My sister isn’t particularly Web-savvy but even she couldn’t wait to show me how easy it was to view and crop a photo from a recent party before setting it as her profile picture in Facebook.
But these sites are all, for good reason, very popular. Seeing as we’re reaching the tail end of a time of giving and sharing, I thought it would be nice to list 5 of my favourite Web apps that you might not have come across before. So, in no particular order:
Sporting possibly the best name for a Web app ever, Hoo.la is a fantastically simple file host. No payments, sign-ups or licence agreements and, apparently, soon to be no bandwidth limits. If you have an image, document or file of any format in an archive and its under 50MB, just hit upload and Hoo.la will host the file for as long as it’s being downloaded. I’ve found it really useful for sending files that are too big to attach to an email or get denied for safety reasons, like archives containing executables. The service is still in beta, but a file size cap that is
constantly increasing (think Gmail)
has been promised once it hits 1.0.
Feed Rinse, from those talented guys at Electric Pulp, is one of those sites that I kicked myself for not having bookmarked—thinking that I’d only use it the once and never need to come back to it—then spent half an hour mashing keywords into Google trying to find it a week later. The site, which in itself is a joy to use, lets you filter any RSS feed of items that you don’t want to appear in your reader. Subscribed to a blog with multiple authors but only interested in posts made by the hot female one? You can add an author filter to the feed so you’re only notified when she makes a post. Filters can be inclusive or exclusive and apply to any part of the feed’s content, making keeping on top of your information intake that much easier.
Boasting
real-time collaboration for the web
, Thinkature pulls off what many other sites have failed to get right. It lets you draw, type notes, upload or search Yahoo for images and chat, all inside a simple whiteboard interface. The registration is nice and quick, asking for nothing more than an email address and password before letting you get started. Anyone without an account can join a whiteboard you’ve created once it’s made public and watch and edit what you create in real-time. I’ve used the service for a range of different things, from visually explaining an idea to a friend, to discussing TF2 tactics using a top-down screenshot of a map as the background. The only small gripe I have is not being able to change the pen colour from black when drawing on top of images, though I’m sure that will be added soon.
This may seem like a bit of shameless self-promotion but seeing as I had no hand in its creation I figured it would be OK to include it. Diarised is a
quick and simple online tool to help you pick the best time for a meeting
. Whilst I can’t say I’ve attended all that many meetings in my life, I can still appreciate the usefulness of this app. You create a meeting and provide as many possible dates and times for it as you like. Diarised then sends an email out to the recipients you enter, letting them choose when the best time would be for them. With no signup required and 7 diferent languages to choose from (go Steve!), it’s a wonder so many people are still organising these things over the phone.
It has to be said, Media-Convert isn’t the prettiest Web app on the ‘Net, but what it lacks in looks it makes up for in brains. Without registering or downloading anything, the service lets you convert pretty much any file under 150MB to whatever you want. That may sound vague but to list the amount of formats it can take would probably break my layout. Unless you’re a nutter looking to convert an MP3 to a JPG, you’ll find yourself coming back to this again and again. The site also offers file hosting and site screenshots but the format conversion is where it really shines.
There’s my top 5. Hopefully you’ll find at least one of them to be useful in the coming year. If you have a favourite app that others might not have heard of or, even better, have just launched the next big thing yourself, please share it in the comments.
Vikram
Sam Rayner
Amir (7 months, 2 weeks ago)
David Turner