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Many consumers are already sick and tired of purchasing and installing software on all of their computers, evidenced by the success of BestBuy’s Geek Squad and other similar services, as simple software installations make up large percentage of their business, but what alternative do consumers have?  Perhaps applications used entirely over the internet will become increasingly popular to aid IT professionals and developers in making application development and deployment easier.  A couple websites have already begun to pop up that showcase the viability of this option and are quite useful right now. 

The first of these two particularly useful web applications that I’d like to highlight is writely.com, a free, internet-based text editor.  Although it does require sign-up (for storing your documents), it is a completely free service that is well worth a look.  The screenshot below demonstrates briefly what this program can do :

Click for full-size

Reading through the sample document I created, you get a pretty good idea of what this can do.  It’s pretty quick, is intuitive, and easy to use.  If you don’t have Microsoft Office and don’t want to pay quite a good sum to get it, this may be worth a shot.

      The other of these two applications is numsum.com.  The screenshot below gives a basic idea of what to expect:

Click for full size:

Numsum functions on the same premise as writely, but is overall a bit less viable due to issues with trying to run a spreadsheet through a webpage.  You cannot use your arrow keys to switch between cells and the page must refresh after you enter a formula.  Also, things you would inherently right-click for do not work.  Although it is an excellent effort and good resource, particularly considering the price (again free), I found it slightly more cumbersome and less user-friendly than writely.

Minor complaints aside, these are great utilities and bode well for internet-based applications.

Chris Leckness (3547 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

Chris Leckness is the Owner/Administrator of Mobilitysite. He is a Microsoft MVP, Mobile Devices and a member of the exclusive focus group, Mobius. Chris runs a Mobilitysite, GotZune, and a few other smaller sites and blogs. His personal blog is chris.leckness.com.