Asciiflow will let you draw ASCII art with a mouse and skip a lot of painstaking space-bar-hitting.
posted by ignignokt on Aug 5, 2011 - 51 comments

Love Helvetica and modernist typographic design? Seen the film? Now, with the power of browser userscripts, you can have the 20th-century high-modernist experience in your favourite web applications. Scripts exist to Helveticise Gmail, Twitter and Google Reader, and work with a variety of modern browsers. [more inside]
posted by acb on Sep 15, 2009 - 69 comments

Software startup 280 North today announced Atlas: a rich, web-based environment for developing Mac-like web applications. [more inside]
posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism on Feb 24, 2009 - 34 comments

The State of the Web 2008 is a report from Web Directions that includes details and analysis of all the responses to over 50 questions covering technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices that today’s web professionals employ. The survey was open for just under 3 weeks, from December 1st to 20th 2008. In total, over 1200 designers and developers from around the world responded to the survey. Respondents were likely to be self-educating, “early adopters” who keep abreast of developments in their field. Here are the tabular results. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Jan 12, 2009 - 7 comments

Having trouble making your decision? Just let the magic power of the internet tell you what to do. You can let someone else do the work, but you're probably better off doing it yourself.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia on Jan 16, 2008 - 21 comments

50 Ways to Take Notes. Brian Benzinger (previously) apparently often finds himself without paper and pencil, but with access to a computer. He's linked to dozens of places online where one can Get It Down (for free!), from public pages to note-taking software to voice recording.
posted by Rykey on Nov 14, 2007 - 9 comments

The White Glove Tracking Project is to Michael Jackson's white glove as Distributed Proofreading is to books. (Partially inspired by the Clickworks Project and the work of artist Paul Pfeiffer)
posted by gwint on May 2, 2007 - 9 comments

Google's word processor (re)launches. Formerly known as Writely, the online application, with all kinds of nifty collaborative features, joins a wide range of free online word processors, including the decent Zoho (you can see reviews of many online word processors here). Want to do presentations instead? Check out Thumbstacks or ThinkFree (with 1 GB of storage). If drawing is your thing, try Litha-Paint, or use SnipShot to crop pictures and save them to Flickr or your computer. Even GE's gotten into the free web application act with their no-registration-required collaborative whiteboard. And the number of free web applications just keeps growing...
posted by blahblahblah on Aug 21, 2006 - 52 comments

Now THIS is an eCommerce shopping cart. Holy crap. Ruby and Ruby on Rails: You officially have my attention. (Documentation includes a free first edition book. Intro for OS X friends fiends) and all.
posted by spock on Feb 25, 2005 - 65 comments

Gmail Apps I'm a self-described GMail addict and overall Google product whore, so this page of applications for Gmail has me doing the happy dance.
posted by JJBotter on Aug 9, 2004 - 34 comments

Windows XP Dev Intro Article introduces some of the new issues associated with developing apps for the next generation Microsoft OS. An excerpt from the article reads "Writing applications for Windows XP requires a few new tricks, but they're not difficult. More important is the message we've been repeating over and over, especially since the introduction of Windows 2000: the more your applications behave like good citizens, the more successfully they'll run on Windows XP. Windows XP applications should to follow the rules you learned in kindergarten: share your resources, play well with others, and follow the rules. It's all about cooperation." Lovely.
posted by tatochip on Feb 19, 2001 - 12 comments

Freebies Aren't Forever. Are free web applications going down in flames? This article make the future out to be dim indeed.
posted by ericost on Jan 18, 2001 - 28 comments

Hotmail users shut out of accounts, find data missing. Don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but it's a nice kick in the ass to remind people: web-based apps aren't all that reliable.
posted by solistrato on Jun 16, 2000 - 7 comments

360-degree video appears to be just like QuickTime VR, only it moves. There's a trippy demo over at Atom Films that uses the technology to put you in an old-folks home. But the downside to 360-video? Lower framerates, and the need for a special camera.
posted by endquote on May 21, 2000 - 1 comment

S u m e a features some amazing ways to use Java and Flash on the web. The best thing about the whole site is how fast all the 'applets' load on my 56k modem.
posted by Mark on Apr 18, 2000 - 4 comments

A company has released a fully web-based spreadsheet program that is utterly amazing. To see it for yourself, go to halfbrain.com and hit the link entitled 'BrainMatter' in the second paragraph in the middle of the page. Incredible.
posted by mathowie on Nov 29, 1999 - 2 comments

Desktop.com now has competition. OpenDesk.com is another in a series of new websites that offer 'weblications' - or web-based applications, using a desktop metaphor. Try out also http://www.simple.com
posted by triptych on Oct 28, 1999 - 4 comments