5 things that Web Apps does better than Native Software
Without realizing it, the cloud caught us all. What once did with a huge repertoire of applications, we now do with a browser or an application that depends on an online service to function. The benefits are not few: our PC release of many tasks and plenty of storage space, and we want all the data available from virtually anywhere with an internet connection.
But we also have the disadvantages of data privacy, of course. Sure we’ve all had doubts about whether companies are abusing our trust and look where they should not.
But what are the activities that we have relied on the cloud? The word “cloud” is relatively new, but we’ve been using the browser beyond the simple web pages long. Let’s look at what people are increasingly accustomed to do through a browser and setting aside the native applications, whether the system might be.
Mail management
With the amount of emails you can go through the boxes of professional and amateur users today (over 200 quietly, and I tell you from experience), take all that data to the cloud frees us from many headaches. No need to set up accounts on native applications, there is no confusion when managing emails, everything stays in sync from anywhere and if we set a new device you simply access the web with our credentials.
The champions of mail in the cloud are veterans and well known: Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail… almost everyone has an account on one or more of these services.
Creating and Editing Documents
Gone are the times when we used to have newest versions of Microsoft Office on our computers. Even the suite has been moved to the cloud Office 365 And now no longer required to pay a license of these applications to view documents. From a browser, and can create and work collaboratively with documents, spreadsheets, presentations and even schemes. The most popular service in this case is undoubtedly Google Docs.
Social Life and Instant Messaging
The social revolution is a website: Facebook. Your servers contain all the information of our accounts. Google Plus, Twitter… everything is centralized on the web leaving these old messages from computer to computer. Even instant messaging protocols themselves have come to the website (Google Talk integrated into Gmail, Google Plus, Facebook chat on the web …), making these traditional applications do not need to combine several protocols as Pidgin or Adium.
Calender
One Calender service synchronized along all your devices is a new trend. The mobile era has empowered Google Calendar as one of the most widely used calendar in the cloud, and Outlook is not far behind considering the Office 365 solution that we mentioned earlier. The latest is with Apple icloud.
Music, Movies, eBooks and Games
Today we have reach to these multimedia content on the go synced to various devices. Here each company takes a different concept, With its catalog of Apple using iTunes to sync all songs by iTunes Match and Google allowing our MP3 up on their servers by Google Music. Applications are not far off: Android Market, App Store and Apple App Store applications… all purchases are available whenever and wherever we want. No more simple licensing and excessive pricing.
Some sophisticated options to be considered are Grooveshark, Spotify, Saavn or Gaana.com which lets you play song of your choice choosing from the huge library of music.
In the future, even more activities will move to the cloud: Google is very clear with Chrome OS, An operating system that is just a browser. Apple and Microsoft want to stick with conventional operating systems, but many features of the device by moving their servers. Meanwhile, web technology is making strides to continue to demonstrate what can be able to cloud.
