MetaFilter posts tagged with webapps

Helveticise your web experience

acb — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:19:04 -0800

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. Of course, you'll need to provide your own copy of Helvetica; Arial is not quite the same.

Yo dawg, we herd you like webapps...

Mr. Anthropomorphism — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:19:28 -0800

Software startup 280 North today announced Atlas: a rich, web-based environment for developing Mac-like web applications. The company garnered praise last year when they released web-based slideshow app 280 Slides, which offers powerful features in an oddly familiar motif. The similarities are more than skin deep, for 280 Slides, though a polished and capable product in its own right, is also a showpiece for even more ambitious projects: a programming language and open-source framework that allow developers to write cross-platform applications for the web (nearly) the same way they would for the Mac. Atlas, then, is a place to put it all together—an online Xcode for Mac-style web development.

The State of the Web 2008

netbros — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:25:52 -0800

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. In short, what did the survey find? Some quite surprising results include:

just how few of the respondents use any form of Internet Explorer for their day to day web use (with only 3 out of over 1200 respondents using IE8), and similarly how few use Google Chrome as their primary browser, despite the splash the launch of that browser recently
nearly half of respondents use Mac OS X as their primary operating system, and only 10% use Windows Vista
less than a third of respondents test their web sites with Internet Explorer 8 (while Mobile Safari comes in at 20%, and Chrome at 40%)

There’s also a great deal of interest in terms of the nitty-gritty of web design philosophy and practice, from the high percentage of respondents who use JavaScript (around 95%), to the very small uptake of Silverlight (around 2% of all respondents) to the very high percentage of database driven sites (96%), overwhelmingly run on open source databases (over 80%). The number of responses, 1234 total, and the results themselves definitely provide both food for thought, and in many cases, cause for optimism that web development best practices are becoming more widely adopted over time. Web Directions conducts two major conferences annually in Sydney, Australia and Vancouver, Canada, and covers the full range of interests for web professionals - web design, front-end and and back-end development, information architecture, interaction design, accessibility, data visualization and much more. Their more focused conferences home in on specific areas and segments, as seen from their podcasts, slides, and other presentation materials.

It's the Web 2.0 eightball.

Mr.Encyclopedia — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 10:45:38 -0800

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.

NB

Rykey — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:29:46 -0800

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.

Mouse in Glove

gwint — Wed, 02 May 2007 10:52:48 -0800

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)

At least I didn't mentione Web 2.0 in the post...

blahblahblah — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 09:54:37 -0800

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...

Now THIS is a shopping cart

spock — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 13:56:07 -0800

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.

Extending Gmail

JJBotter — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 17:26:19 -0800

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.

tatochip — Mon, 19 Feb 2001 09:47:06 -0800

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.

ericost — Thu, 18 Jan 2001 10:32:41 -0800

Freebies Aren't Forever. Are free web applications going down in flames? This article make the future out to be dim indeed.

solistrato — Fri, 16 Jun 2000 12:57:08 -0800

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.

endquote — Sun, 21 May 2000 19:25:34 -0800

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.

Mark — Tue, 18 Apr 2000 19:56:49 -0800

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.

mathowie — Mon, 29 Nov 1999 09:49:55 -0800

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.

triptych — Thu, 28 Oct 1999 23:02:33 -0800

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