Category: Tutorials

Advertise here

Update: Since we have only received a handful of submissions, we have decided to extend the submission deadline for this until Fall, 2011.

When we published our first article back in September of 2007 we had no idea how successful this site could become. In fact, we weren’t quite sure anyone would be interested in it. Since then, a lot has changed. We’ve grown from a small Photoshop blog to the largest Photoshop site on the planet. We’ve welcomed many new editors, authors, and readers to our site and have touched the lives of hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people. Today, we would like to hear your stories. We want to know how Psdtuts has affected your life and we want you to share your story by uploading a video testimonial to our Facebook page.

I will be the first to tell you how Psdtuts has changed my life. When I left my 9 – 5 job, it gave me some much-needed income while I looked for a new position. When nothing panned out, Psdtuts gave me a part-time job assisting Sean Hodge, the previous editor, and finally, when I was promoted to editor, it allowed me to move to New York City to live with my girlfriend.

Now that I’ve told you how Psdtuts has changed my life. What’s your story? Have we helped you land a job? Have we helped you with a key project? Have we helped you make a major life change? We want to know! To encourage you to share your stories we will give one of you a free Wacom Intuos 4 Medium Tablet (via Amazon).

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How to Submit

To submit, record a video testimonial explaining your story. This can be done on your webcam or camcorder. Feel free to have fun with this video – edit it, add animation, music, graphics or whatever you need to do to tell your story. Just try to keep the video between 1 – 5 minutes.

Once you’ve recorded your video, upload it to our Facebook Page. Follow the instructions below to upload your video.

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How We Will Award the Tablet

After we have reviewed all the entries, we will choose our favorite from all the submissions. While we may take the quality of the video into consideration when we award the tablet, ultimately, the most important factor for judging the videos will be the story that is told. So don’t let your lack of video production skills get in the way of telling us how we’ve affected your lives.

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Rules

• You can only submit 1 video.
• Avoid giving away too much personal information in your video. For example, don’t tell us your phone number or street address. We will figure all that out later on.
• Submissions will be accepted until Fall, 2011
• While this giveaway is open to all of our readers, Amazon may not ship to your area. If that is the case we will send you the value of the tablet via PayPal.
• Terms are subject to change.

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In today’s mobile and tablet-centric world, it often feels like the best apps come out only for smartphones. Web apps and traditional PC apps often aren’t as fancy as their mobile counterparts. Plus, they’re often much more expensive than the dollar or two you might pay for a high quality mobile app.

This morning on Hacker News, I came across a new web app from the developers of a popular mobile to-do list app, Do It (Tomorrow). It turned out to be an impressive example that web apps don’t have to be saddled with bland interfaces. Best of all, it’s been designed to make it easier to manage your tasks, so it’s an elegant UI with a purpose. Keep reading to get a quick tour of Do It Tomorrow and see if this free web app is the to-do list you’ve been needing.

Tomorrow.do

Do It Tomorrow is a popular mobile app that has made it’s way to the world of web apps. Each of their apps has nearly the same interface, and are designed to make it incredibly simple to keep up with what you need to do today and tomorrow. Rather than forcing you to organize tasks into projects, add tags or locations, and more, Do It Tomorrow simply has two plain text lists of the tasks you need to do today and tomorrow. Can’t finish something today? It’ll automatically be added to tomorrow’s list, ready for you to conquer later.

Do it Tomorrow can now work from any browser at their brilliant address, Tomorrow.do. The app’s beautiful interface has been brought over to the web. In fact, it could easily be mistaken for a premium iPad app.

Beautiful, natural interface right in your browser

Ready to try it out? Just click the bottom right corner of the book, and it will open to reveal task lists for today and tomorrow’s tasks. If you’re using a Webkit-powered browser such as Chrome or Safari, the book will animate while it’s opening just like a real book. This has been designed using CSS 3D tranforms, and it will be exciting to see how developers use features like this in the future to make even more natural interfaces in the browser. The only problem is, you can’t use the app in Internet Explorer (but you weren’t going to anyhow, right? ).

The task book opens with CSS 3D transforms

Getting Your Account

You can go ahead and start adding tasks without an account, but since Do It (Tomorrow) is free, you can make an account and keep your tasks forever on any device. Just click the I am a new user button on the right, enter your email and a password, and click Register. Right away, without refreshing your page, you’ll be logged in and can start adding new tasks to your account. Unfortunately, if you typed in any tasks before you registered, these won’t be imported into your account right now. Hopefully that will be changed in the future.

You can then choose for the app to keep you logged in, though in my tests, it’s currently logging you out every time you close the tab whether you check the box or not. Still, it’s about the easiest signup process I’ve ever seen on a web app.

Signup in one step

Today & Tomorrow

Keeping up with the things you need to do isn’t much harder. Just type in the things you want to do today or tomorrow in the top line on their respective pages. Hit enter to add the task, and you can then immediately start typing in your next task. Each of the tasks looks somewhat like they’re written by hand, with the Vavont font and drawn arrows.

Add tasks for today and tomorrow quickly

Once you’ve finished a task, just click it to scratch it off. Or, if you decide to put something off until tomorrow, or want to do one of tomorrow’s tasks today, just click the arrow on the task to push it to the next page. You can also delete tasks: click the edit button, then click the iOS style delete button beside the task you want to remove.

Mark off finished tasks, or put them off until tomorrow

That’s all there is to it. Do it Tomorrow is a dead-simple way to keep up with the basic things you need to do. If you need to keep track of advanced projects and deadlines, it’s likely not the app you need. But,  most of us need to keep up with some of the smaller things that need done each day that we’d otherwise forget. Even if you use a more advanced task manager, it can be nice to see what you really need to get done today, and put everything else off.

That’s where this app comes in handy. It’s easy to manage, and won’t take hours to learn how to use it. Plus, if you don’t get something done today, it’ll automatically get pushed to the next day’s list until you get it done. Just jot down those things you need to get done, and quit worrying about forgetting them.

Take Your Tasks With You

Do it Tomorrow came out first as a mobile app, and the web app is the latest addition to the suite. If you’d like to keep up with your tasks on the go, be sure to check out their mobile apps. You can download a free Android app or a basic iPhone version to try it out, or get the premium version that works on iPhone and iPad. Sign in with the account you just made, and your tasks from your browser will be ready to be finished on the go.

Also, I tried out the web app on an iPod Touch and iPad running iOS 4.3, and it worked amazingly well. So, if there’s not a mobile app for your smartphone, you could give the web app a try and see if it works in your browser. If it’s Webkit-based, it just might work.

Use Do It (Tomorrow) on your smartphone or iPad

Conclusion

There’s no lack of project and task management apps, and sometimes it seems like there’s more than anyone could possibly use. The great thing is, that means there’s likely an app out there that will fit your precise work style. It’s nice to see such a well designed app be brought to the web, while still feeling like a modern smartphone or tablet app.

Be sure to give Tomorrow.do a try! It’s beautiful, free, and, hey, it just might help you keep up with what you need to do. Tomorrow.

The importance of institutional education varies depending on culture and geography. For instance, in the part of the world I live, at least one professional college degree is a must to have a fair chance in landing a decent job. The number of degrees is directly proportional to the social status.

On the contrary, in countries like USA, college and school drop outs don’t have so much hardship in life. In fact, successful people like Peter Thiel encourage students with upfront cash to drop out of college. In my opinion, both the mindsets are flawed. Not everyone is brilliant, self starting and adaptive to changing conditions.

The thing is, it’s not a degree per se that is so important, but the education you gain from it. Education is what gives the rest of the average and below average students a sense of direction and a chance to figure out what they are better suited to do in life, and can even broaden advanced students’ world view. OpenStudy is a virtual meeting place for students from across the globe to form study groups and learn everything from Math to History. Let’s see how you can use this to broaden your own horizons and learn more, whether you’re in college or starting the next Facebook.

Overview

OpenStudy is a social learning network where students ask questions, give help, and connect with other students studying the same things. The web app is aimed at making the world one large study group, regardless of school or location.

Overview

OpenStudy is a free web app and is open to anyone above 13 years of age. You can sign up for the service with your existing Facebook account over OAuth.

Getting Started

Getting started with OpenStudy is extremely simple even if you haven’t used a lot of web apps in the past. Think of OpenStudy as a Question and Answer service like Yahoo Answers or even as the Facebook comment system that’s been designed fully around education. You either post a question or answer an existing one. Eitherway, you can get the job done in a few seconds as soon as you finish typing your question or response.

School Specific Courses

First up, choose a subject of your choice. Don’t get fooled by the eight subjects prominently displayed and make sure you hit See all groups. You will find almost all subjects taught in schools covered here and in some cases, specific courses from partnering institutes are covered as well. Best of all, many of the subjects can be viewed freely online from iTunes U or MIT OpenCourseWare.

Accessing Study Groups

User Interface

Once you are in a study group, you will find that the page is divided into two major sections. On the left side you have questions and this section is updated in real time. Here you can switch between the tabs to find recent questions, unanswered questions and the questions you have asked so far.

Each question is accompanied by a badge that indicates the number of responses it has got so far even before opening the page. In addition to the badges, the app does a great job indicating how many people are currently viewing the question and if there has been an answer that satisfies the person who posted it.

Answering a Question

You can answer questions from a text box and if need be, use the Equation feature to input a complex equation whose symbols can’t be found in a standard keyboard. An option to attach files is available as well. If you find an answer that offers a perfect solution, use the Good Answer option to reward it with a medal.

Achievements and Medals

The Leaderboard

What good is educational app that doesn’t grade students based in their knowledge and achievements? OpenStudy has a cool system that offers medals upon achievements and promotes them to various levels based on merit. On the right side of the study group page, you will find the leaderboard of sorts cum status page.

Profile View

All profiles are accompanied by the number of answers each one has provided in the web app, the user level they are in and the question they are currently viewing. As a newbie, you will start as a Neophyte and do note that the levels you achieve are exclusive to individual study groups. So if you reach the highest level in the Math group, you still will have to climb from the Neophyte level in other study groups.

If you are in doubt, check out the tips window that shows up from time to time explaining the levels, achievements, medals and other things related to OpenStudy. Also try using their real time group chat to converse with fellow students.

Final Thoughts

Despite being a for-profit startup, OpenStudy has a noble goal of helping people learn. The web app is well designed and is very intuitive to use. The easy to use and elegant design in fact will make students – who usually tend have a very little attention span – to say longer than usual on the site and give it a serious try.

However, I do have two serious concerns about the app. Why do they have to collect all my Facebook data and then again put me through a sign up process? I don’t see the relevance of having all my personal data in the system as it doesn’t add any value at all.

Second, there aren’t a lot of people online at any given time. I monitored the number of online users over a few days and found that except for the Math section, most of the time only a handful of students are available online. Hope this changes as the app gains some traction!

Share Your Thoughts!

As a student, how useful are web apps like OpenStudy to help you learn? Which one in your opinion is a more productive option – a local study group or a virtual, global one?

Or, if you’re looking to get different questions answered, check out our roundup on Great Ways to Get Your Questions Answered Online

You’ve released a great new app or started the store you’ve always dreamed of, you’ve gotten covered in all the top sites, and you’ve got customers actually paying you money for your hard work. Congratulations! Now comes the hard part: supporting your customers.

No matter how nice your service or product is, your customers will need help with it. You’ll need to help them with everything from pre-sales questions to billing problems, from issues with your product to things you could have never thought of before.

The problem is, most customer support web apps are rather expensive, and can quickly eat into the meager amount your startup’s making. Plus, they’re often complicated and confusing to use, and don’t work exactly like you want.

WooThemes, the popular WordPress theme design firm, recently launched a brand new app theme, SupportPress. This advanced theme transforms a simple WordPress site into a full-fledged support system for your team. Does it have what your company needs? Let’s dive in and see.

A New Take on Customer Support Software

Since its release in 2003, WordPress has grown from a simple blogging system to an advanced content management system that powers over 50 million sites today. Much of its success is due to the wide variety of plugins and themes that 3rd party developers have created for it. They’ve turned basic WordPress blogs into interactive news sites and easy to update Tumblog-style sites.

Now, they’re going a step further. Theme developers at Themeforest, AppThemes, WooThemes, and more have started using custom post types and taxonomies in WordPress to turn the CMS into Q&A, reality management, job boards, and more.

The latest of these is SupportPress from WooThemes, and it is one of the most impressive app themes we’ve seen. Simply install the one theme, and your whole site will be made over into a support tool where you can save documentation, respond to customer support tickets, post updates about your site, and send private messages to your team. Most support web apps cost $9-$30 a month, and will cost even more as your support team grows. With SupportPress, you can buy the $100 theme once, and use it forever.

SupportPress is a responsive web app that works on all screen sizes (via WooThemes)

Setting Up Your SupportPress

To get started, simply upload the theme and install it on your site as you would any other WordPress theme. Once it’s installed, you need to open your Permalink settings under your WordPress main settings and save the settings to register the new post types. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be ready to dive into SupportPress.

Your WordPress dashboard will now show 4 new section in the left menu: Tickets, KB articles, Messages, and the SupportPress settings. You can view the individual tickets and messages here, and edit them with the normal WordPress editing environment. You can also tweak SupportPress with your company’s own style and logo, and can choose whether you want the support site open to everyone or only to members.

New Ticket, KB Articles, and Messages, and the SupportPress Dashboard

For the most part, though, you’ll never need to use the WordPress dashboard when using SupportPress. Your customers and support team can create and respond to tickets, view internal messages, or tweak their own profile and email settings right from SupportPress without having to navigate into WordPress.

Do almost everything without ever touching the WordPress Dashboard

Support Your Customers, Seamlessly

Now that you’ve got SupportPress installed, your site will be fully transformed into a support center. Your support site will look different depending on who visits. Normal visitors will see your blog posts and knowledge base, and can sign up to submit a support ticket. Existing customers can see the status of the tickets they’ve submitted, and reply to them when they’re logged in. And support agents will see all tickets they need to respond to, ones they’ve been assigned, and can also view internal messages.

You'd never know it's WordPress

To submit a support ticket, your users will first need to register for an account with an email and username. They can then log in and submit questions or problems they’re having with your product. They can even include an attachment with the ticket, which is a great way for people to send a screenshot to show exactly what’s wrong.

Anyone can easily submit a ticket

Once tickets have been submitted, agents can respond to them directly in SupportPress. The tickets can be assigned to someone else in the company if you can’t respond, or can be marked as closed if you’re finished. Alternately, if you’d like to reuse your support in the future, you can turn a support ticket into a public knowledge base article in a click.

Follow up on tickets, or convert support requests into Knowledge Base articles

Using SupportPress In Your Company

SupportPress makes it easy to find tickets from the administrative dashboard. You can search through tickets, view only new tickets, or sort them by their category. Best of all, you can see how old a ticket is, so you can respond to them based on how urgent or old the case is.

Find the tickets that need dealt with first

Another great feature for your team is the internal messages. These are similar to group emails, and will only be seen by administrators on your account. This way, you can send messages that your whole team can see. It’s a nice way to keep everyone informed of what’s going on, without having to use another messaging tool.

Send private messages internally to your team

Conclusion

SupportPress is an impressive tool that makes it easy to create the support system your team needs. It may cost more upfront and take a bit more time to get setup, but over time, you can see huge savings from managing your own support system. We’re always excited to see web apps that you can install on your own server, and it’s amazing how simple they can be to deploy today.

It’s still not the perfect tool for every team, though. Many newer support systems include rich social media integration, so you can keep up with support requests that come through Twitter and more. Additionally, most support tools let you receive emails to, say, support@yoursite.com, and automatically import them as new tickets. SupportPress doesn’t include either of these features, though they are considering adding email integration. If they do, it’ll be useful for many more teams. Even still, though, it includes a great amount of features that should be useful to many.

If you’d like to give SupportPress a try, feel free to play with WooTheme’s SupportPress demo, or create a free account and try it out in their WooThemes Playground. We’d love to hear your thoughts about SupportPress, and what you think of the new trend for WordPress app themes.

One of the biggest promises of web apps is that you can use them anywhere on any computer with an internet connection. Whether you’re at home on your netbook, in the office on an iMac, or on your Aunt’s XP desktop, your web apps will work the same if you have a decently modern browser. Without installing anything, you can quickly get to work and find your files no matter where you are.

A decade ago, most people only ever used one computer, or possibly one at home and another in their office. In today’s world, it’s more likely than ever that you’ll be accessing your data from a variety of different machines. Tablets, netbooks, variety of different sized desktops, and full featured laptops: there’s more choice than ever, and increasingly, we one more than one of them.

I’ve personally relied on web apps for years to keep up with my files so I’ll always have access to them no matter where I am. I’ve sent email from kiosk computers in airports, ran across the road from a hospital to an internet café to email homework to professors, and borrowed others computers to touch up documents in Office Live or Google Docs before sending them in. Even if I buy a new computer, I’m ready to go quicker than ever thanks to relying on a variety of cloud services.

So how about you? Have you taken advantage of being able to you your web apps from anywhere, or do you still treat them more like traditional programs, tied to the browser on your personal computer? Do you use your personal web app accounts from work, or would you log on to finish some work from someone else’s computer?

Remember the days of actually having meetings face-to-face? Sitting around a table in suits discussing finance and such? Well, time’s have changed and now we do our collaboration online. I can collaborate with a colleague in Australia from my home in the UK thanks to a wealth of online collaboration tools.

MeetingBurner is another online meeting tool, currently in beta, with some pretty nice enhancements over what the competition currently offers. MeetingBurner advertises itself as being one of the easiest meeting platforms to just get involved with, and it’s certainly pretty simple therein. Not only will MeetingBurner reignite your love for screen-sharing, but it will also stream the host’s webcam to get a visual conferencing experience.

Wanna Meet Up?

MeetingBurner is, as it’s name suggests, all about meetings. Upon signup, one chooses a username which forms his invite link, used to share a meeting with others. Also generated will be a moderator and participant PIN, for use during call-ins. This PIN actually allows participants to call in, using a regular telephone, and dial the extension in order to participate in the conference call. MeetingBurner also offers a quick link to Skype, as the same results can be achieved there.

The dashboard of MeetingBurner.

MeetingBurner allows for meetings to be launched immediately, or be scheduled ahead of time. Choosing to initiate a meeting straight away kicks it off immediately, allowing you to push out your invites and get collaborating. However, scheduling a meeting allows you to setup all the details of the meeting ahead of time, with an invite link to send around your team. Conveniently, the meeting can be easily imported into iCal or Microsoft Outlook with full details (including the aforementioned invitation link and PINs) included.

What really surprised me was that MeetingBurner includes an option to test out your meeting ahead of time, to make sure everything works so you don’t run into problems on the day. This is a really great feature if this meeting is critical, and can’t have anything go wrong.

Start the Call

MeetingBurner transforms into a slick dashboard upon the launching of a meeting. Down the side is your host viewer (a live video stream of the host’s webcam), meeting information including call-in numbers and PINs, and list of participants with chat. Floated to the right is the main viewer, which optionally includes a stream of the host’s screen through a plug-in.

Meetings can be recorded through the click of a button and saved for viewing later. If you stop a recording, an email is sent with details on how to retrieve and share your recordings. These recordings can be simply emailed and watched back, embedded directly on a website, or exported to YouTube.

Full-screen mode can be great, especially on larger screens.

Meetings can also be easily taken full screen (possibly for use by multiple people), making MeetingBurner feel like a native application with a distraction-free conferencing experience.

Screen-sharing and Video

A big attraction of MeetingBurner is that is seamlessly lets you stream your whole screen or a portion of it to all the conference participants, with minimal lag (if your connection is strong enough). This is a great feature that works with a native app to capture your screen and stream it in MeetingBurner. Those with a multiple-screen setup will appreciate that MeetingBurner allows you to selectively choose them to display, or just centralise on one specific region of a given display.

MeetingBurner’s screen sharing is very simple, and lacks desirable options, however. For example, I’d love to have seen standard features like cursor highlighting that are popular in dedicated screen-recording software. That said, for a free conferencing tool, it’s not bad, either!

Sharing screens with MeetingBurner is relatively simple.

Final Thoughts

MeetingBurner is a very simple and effective tool that is not at all to apply to a range of different scenarios. Whether you’re working on a website and want to collaborate on your latest project with your graphic designer 2,000 miles away, or an accountant sharing the quarter’s financial results with investors, MeetingBurner is a great tool for any business to use, being super flexible and applicable to a plethora of situations.

The screen-sharing feature has some enhancements we’d like to see, but overall, it’s a robust and effective contribution to the whole package. Another great feature is the calling functionality that allows a participant to, through a regular phone or Skype, call in to a meeting in the same way a traditional conference call would be held. The provided PIN numbers also mean your call is secure and won’t face intrusion (including your rivals checking in on your top-secret brainstorming sessions!).

Getting In

MeetingBurner is in a strict beta and, without an invite, you won’t get in. However, should you manage to, MeetingBurner will offer you invites to get some of your coworkers in too, which is always nice.

Finally, we can look to the future for some idea of how MeetingBurner will become even more useful. An iPad browser is in the works, which will be especially useful, as is an “improved full screen mode”.

Have you been in MeetingBurner? Be sure to share your experiences in the comments.

Computers are interesting devices. They’re easily one of the most influential inventions mankind has ever produced, and are crucial to almost everything we do today. From smartphones to tablets to Google’s massive servers around the globe, computers come in all shapes and sizes and are used for a mind-boggling array of tasks.

What sets apart computers from the wheel, hammer, engine, and other major inventions of humanity is the varied ways a computer can be put to use. They can calculate the amount of fuel needed to get to the moon, animate characters and render picture-perfect landscapes, and let you talk with friends around the globe. Computers don’t do this on their own, though. The special thing is the software or apps that run on them. Without software, computers are simply black boxes.

So what makes one type of software different from another? Why would you choose web apps over native applications, and why does it really matter?

The Traditional Software Landscape

If you’ve used computers for any period of time, you’ve likely installed software the traditional way. Best Buy, Walmart, and many other big box retailer used to carry rows of software in boxes, complete with disks, user manuals, and a dozen license and warranty papers you never touched. You’d pop the disk out, walk through the 35 step install process, and hope it didn’t corrupt your registry in the process. Or, if you were lucky enough to get started in computers before CDs were prevalent, you might have installed Office from a stack of 25 floppies. There were so many things that could go wrong: a floppy could be broken, you could have the wrong version of your operating system or drivers, or a dozen other problems.

But, for all of the frustrations, we still installed software. Sure, you could just use Paint and Notepad on your new HP. But the true promise of your machine lay with your software. Mathematica turned your computer into a research lab, and Photoshop turned it into a dark room. The frustrations and steps were worth it.

Autocad, Office, Adobe Suite, and more made computers essential to business

An Island to Itself

Still, traditional software had a number of major problems. If you were a Mac user in the ’90′s, there was an increasingly limited number of applications to buy, and everyone expected you to be able to run PC software. Interestingly, the opposite is true today. Either way, you are limited on what you can do based on your platform.

Then, sharing files from desktop applications has always been frustrating. A Word document from one version with its own settings would often look much different on another version of Office. Even your Photoshop files might not look the same on another computer if they don’t have the same fonts. And who hasn’t been frustrated trying to get a home network running just to share files between computers?

The joy of sharing files

The Promise of the Cloud

Enter web applications. Ubiquitous broadband connections and faster browsers led developers to create increasingly sophisticated web sites that worked much like traditional desktop programs. Web sites were originally static pages of text and images, but even news sites today are often powered by content management systems with sophisticated formatting and layout tools that rival word processors that were cutting edge little more than a decade ago.

These web apps offered many advantages. They could run in almost any browser, no matter if you were using Windows, OS X, Linux, or some future OS no one had ever heard of yet. They didn’t take 30 steps to install, and you didn’t have to drive across town to buy them. Drop your computer down the stairs, and you could be up and running with your web apps from your friend’s computer in seconds. And sharing files was no hassle; in fact, most web apps were fully designed around being collaborative.

Realtime collaboration without emailing Excel files back and forth

Web apps have made our computing experience less tied to one machine than ever before. And increasingly, they don’t skimp on features just because they’re in the browser. HTML5 is bringing hardware accelerated applications to the browser, and a growing number of apps are using it to let you use your favorite web apps even when you’re offline. They’re far from perfect, but if you’ve been using an OS that feels left behind by application developers or often switch between different platforms, the ability to run the newest stuff on any computer is magical.

Losing Your Computer’s Advantage

But cloud apps still have several major problems. First, for the most part, they only work when you’re online. Offline web apps are coming, and some like LucidChart already work great even if your internet connection is down. In general, though, even with offline web apps, you’re still dependent on the service to stay online. If Adobe went out of business, you could keep running Photoshop, but if Aviary went out of business, you’d never be able to use their apps again.

Then, they make your internet connection and your browser’s speed the main differentiator in your computing experience. A brand new Core i7 computer will not feel any faster than an Atom processor if your internet connection is sluggish. And for most web apps, snazzy new hardware such as an accelerometer or a touchscreen won’t make your experience any better. Web apps are optimized for everyone, not for specific machines. While this has its advantages, it can be a problem too.

Native apps can make the most of your hardware (pictured: Labyrinth 2 for iPad)

Native + Cloud: Better Together

So what’s the solution? Should we give up on web apps, or should we be content to get a sub-par experience with them? Apple’s App Store on iOS and Macs has proved that there’s still a world of amazing applications that run natively on your devices, and most of us are excited to try out the latest ones. They’ve even gotten easier to install, thanks to online distribution. But then, at the same time, we’d be lost without Google Apps such as Gmail, and most people spend more time in their browser than in any other program. And without web apps, it’s not getting any easier to use the same apps on all platforms.

But for web apps to win, native apps do not have to disappear. Instead, they can work together, each bringing the best parts of their own platform. Native applications can take advantage of your hardware, while web apps can take advantage of the network. A good example of this might be office apps. Anyone that’s used the latest versions of Microsoft Office or iWork knows that they can make much nicer looking documents that Google Docs. But then, try collaborating on a product plan with a colleague, and suddenly the magic of Google Docs comes clear. It isn’t the best page layout tool, but it sure is great for working together on a document or saving a spreadsheet of data where everyone can access it. There’s a place for both, and you’ll get the best use of your computers and time by leveraging both apps for their own best uses.

Cloud App uses native apps for system integration, and the cloud for sharing and collaboration. Win/Win

Then, an increasing number of apps are designed by default to work with the cloud. Simplenote is an incredibly simple service for saving notes, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular if it was only a web app. Instead, its native iOS and desktop apps such as Notational Velocity have made it indispensable to many of us. You’ve got the best experience of native apps (keyboard shortcuts, integration with other apps, data saved locally and offline), but with the great features that web apps can bring (works on any platform, designed for sharing and collaboration, data stored centrally so you’ll never lose your work).

Cloud + Native apps together give you a great experience everywhere (pictured: Simplenote in native apps)

That, in my opinion, is the future of apps: a world where native apps and web apps work together seamlessly, and everyone gets the best of both worlds. We’ve had it for years with email, which has been one web app that’s always worked great with native apps. With increasingly powerful web apps, and native apps that integrate with the cloud, you shouldn’t have to choose between the cloud and native functionality.