It’s about time when most students have returned to their schools, colleges or other places of education. Whilst there’s many desktop apps available to help in the education field, it’s sometimes hard to find viable online alternatives.
Online alternatives to popular desktop apps offer a way of working entirely online and therefore being able to access your work from anywhere without the need to be emailing or upload files every time you make an edit. This is becoming increasingly important, with new laptops and operating systems such as the Macbook Air and Chrome OS, that have reduced storage and a more cloud-based storage going mainstream. (Well, maybe not Chrome OS, but the Macbook Air is certainly getting positive reviews).
In this roundup, we’ll be looking at web apps that you can use in lieu of your common desktop apps.
Google Docs
Google Docs is one of the most popular alternatives to Microsoft’s suite of desktop apps, Office. Google’s free package offers limited tools for online, and collaborative, word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, forms and drawings.
A superior feature that Google Docs has over it’s rivals is the collaboration tools to allow multiple people to view and edit the document. This is live and realtime editing similar to what was seen on Google Wave.
Price: Free
Developer: Google
SlideRocket
SlideRocket is another alternative to apps like Keynote or PowerPoint that offers online presentation production. You can import existing PowerPoint presentations to move them to the cloud, or just create brand new ones from scratch on the service.
Like Google Docs, you can share and collaborate on presentations with partners if you so wish. When you’re finished, you can present your slideshow live in a Webex-style experience.
Price: Free (with Pro and Enterprise paid plans available from $24/month)
Developer: SlideRocket, Inc.
Picnik
Picnik is an online image editing app that allows you to crop, rotate, resize, fix and add filters to your photos. For light image editing, Picnik is perfect, especially with the ability to import images from Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket and other sources. And you don’t even need to register or login.
If you use IE, Firefox or Chrome, you can download a plugin to access Picnik faster. On Firefox and Chrome, this includes the ability to take screenshots of webpages and import them directly into the service.
Price: Free (with premium plan available)
Developer: Google
Instapaper
Instapaper is a bookmarklet and web companion that allows you to save webpages for viewing later. You can then come back to reading these later on from the Instapaper website/app, Kindle or iOS device.
iOS app Reeder also features Instapaper integration so if you subscribe to blogs, these can be easily read later on any of the aforementioned platforms.
Price: Free
Developer: Marco Arment
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is an online alternative to any kind of calendar app that is used for managing projects. In Smartsheet, you can create projects with subtasks in. Each of these subtasks can be set a status like “In Progress” and be assigned to members of your team or group.
You can also view your project timescale in the Gantt, calendar-style view.
Price: From $9.95/month (free trial available)
Developer: Smartsheet
MobileMe
MobileMe is Apple’s set of web apps built especially for syncing iOS devices. Included in the package is a powerful email web app, calendar app and gallery.
The Mail app is especially important as it offers an experience similar to that of Mail.app on Mac OS X and Outlook on Windows. And it can sync with both those on your desktop and your mobile devices.
You can also use Find my iPhone (a free feature outside of the subscription) to track your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and communicate it by sending messages, playing a sound, remotely locking it or wiping it.
Price: $99/year
Developer: Apple, Inc.
Meebo
It’s important to stay in touch with friends as life is not all work. Meebo is an online web alternative to your favorite desktop IM client. Meebo allows you to visit their website and chat to your AIM, Yahoo!, Google, Windows Live, Facebook, etc. friends.
The Meebo Minibar extension also allows you to check in and share your favorite websites.
Price: Free
Developer: Meebo
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a popular desktop and mobile app that started out serving up only Twitter feeds. Now it has not only Twitter integration, but also Facebook, Foursquare and Google Buzz, so you can stay in touch on all your favorite social networks.
As we said before, it’s important to stay connected with friends, Twitter is also a great source for sharing and receiving links to interesting pieces on the web.
Price: Free
Requires: Google Chrome
Developer: TweetDeck
Google Notebook
We’ve already covered Google Docs but if you simply want to take fast notes from a lecture, Google also provides a little-known Google Notebook web app. Here you can create notebooks and add notes that group together in those notebooks.
You can export these notebooks into Google Docs, as HTML or just print them.
Price: Free
Developer: Google
Stupeflix Studio
Stupeflix is an on-the-fly video editor that offers basic video production features, mainly suited for creating image slideshows. There’s a handful of pretty great themes that your projects can be built from.
You can affix text and soundtracks to grouped images and videos before exporting your video. You can share and embed the videos for free and pay for increased quality.
Price: Free (paid plans available from $29/year)
Developer: Stupeflix
Bonus: FarmVille
Sure, it’s important to be productive at school or college, but you should also have a bit of fun. FarmVille is a web game… well, you probably know what it is.
FarmVille is a Facebook phenomenon with over 62 million active users and over 24.6 million fans.
Price: Free
Requires: Facebook Account
Developer: Zynga
What Else?
Are you a student? Do you regularly use a web app in your education in lieu of a full, desktop app? Be sure to let us know in the comments!
Be sure to check out iPhone.AppStorm’s “100 iPhone Apps to Learn Anything & Everything“!