Chad's News

A web application is a program run over the internet via a browser. So, for example, Writely is a full-featured word processor accessible via the web. The advantage of Writely, as with all web applications, is that you can use the program and access your data from anywhere in the world and on any computer.

An early type of web application was web-based email. Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail, and GMail are examples. But recently we’ve seen the advent of full office suites. In addition to Writely there are Thinkfree, Zoho Writer, Google Spreadsheets, Picasa Photo Editor, Google Calendar, and Google Base (among others). Microsoft, obviously a bit worried about this competition, is planning to make their Works office suite available via the web.

Web applications are catching on—even in the Chad’s News household. I’ve switched mail programs from Outlook Express to Gmail. I did it for the spam filtering, but it’s also nice to be able to check email whenever I’m out of town. I also switched RSS readers from Habari Xenu to Bloglines.

One of the big negatives for web applications is that you’re trusting precious data to a third party. Using Gmail, for example, I have no way of backing up my email data and I’m trusting Google to maintain it in perpetuity. I’m also trusting Google to not go out of business. (This can be a real issue. I have a friend who hosted digital photos in an online repository that went out of business with almost no notice. He happened to be offline for a few weeks, and by the time he got back online it was too late to retrieve his data.) There are also privacy concerns when using a web service for confidential data.

Another negative is that web applications rarely have all of the features found in a dedicated program. For most people this will not be a issue, but power users may run into problems.

Web applications are here to stay, and they’re gaining in popularity. Expect to see them used more frequently.

(Thanks to Josh for the idea behind this article.)
Copyright © 2006 by Chad Cloman

With the majority of software, when you purchase it you are actually buying a license to use the software (rather than the software itself). This scheme was created fairly early in the life of PCs. Most people don’t notice it, but smart businesspeople are aware of the implications. It does occasionally cause problems, and a particularly funny one recently occurred in a New Jersey parking garage.

http://arstechnica.com/…

This is a great resource for web developers: a comprehensive internet browser archive. Need to test that web site on IE 4.0 but don’t have a copy available? Just go download it.

http://browsers.evolt.org/
(via digg)

I know a good bit about how to use Linux, but I’m completely lost when the discussion turns to the merits of the various “flavors” that are available (Debian vs. Slackware anyone?). In the past, I just went with Red Hat because I knew it was a good choice, but that particular distribution has been discontinued. This article compares ten of the most popular Linux distributions. It’s an easy read, good for non-experts.

http://www.linuxforums.org/…

Years after I shelled out money for Adobe Acrobat, I found out there are several open-source, freeware programs that create PDF files. I could have saved my money if I’d known. It’s always been difficult for me to find a good freeware program to do what I want, and I tend to end up paying for software. I knew that SourceForge was a good place to look, but I felt like I was blindly groping in the dark. Well now that has come to an end. Wikipedia—a wonderful site if you’re not familiar with it—has a categorized list of all known open-source software, most (if not all) of which is freeware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/…

Microsoft has free programs that allow you to view/print Office documents. I use StarOffice, but found that every once in a while it had problems with PowerPoint presentations—so this is just the thing I need. While I’m on the topic, OpenOffice is another good choice for the discerning user who doesn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a productivity suite.

http://pchere.blogspot.com/…

Wired News has a list of the the 10 worst software bugs of all time (obviously they never saw any of my code):

http://www.wired.com/…