ID:90513
 
Keywords: free, online, tools
One of my professors has a habit of sharing interesting things with the class. This semester he actually had an entire presentation devoted to free tools on the web. Being a web technology class, he showed us a lot of very neat and powerful tools on the web. I'm going to give details on the ones I found interesting.

Free answers to any question: www.chacha.com
Send a text with a question to 242-242 and you'll get a free answer. I toyed around with this a long time ago. It's interesting to ask them random questions, or even questions that their privacy policy don't allow them to answer. Sometimes you'll get a personal response. For example, you might ask them, "What is your favorite video game?" and you'll get some silly answer regarding that. I asked them for the business hours of a local DMV and got prompt answers.

Editing Images: http://photoshop.com/ and http://sumopaint.com/
I've heard of sumopaint before, but never took the time to look into it or see how neat it really was. Kind of neat seeing photoshop-esque programs being executed on the web.

Online Document Editing: http://docs.google.com/ and http://zoho.com/
Tayoko and I have been using several google web tools for our development processes (docs and groups). I'd say that google docs is very useful for collaboration. However, zoho can't be ruled out just for being lesser known, as it may very well be more complete.

File Storage:
http://yousendit.com/ - offers file storage and delivery for up to 2 GBs of storage.
This is pretty cool for sending large files for free.

http://mesh.com/ syncs your data between computers (even Macs) and offers 5GB of storage online.
I really liked the idea behind this but have yet to try it out.

http://adrive.com/ - Offers 50GB of online storage completely free.
Just an insane amount of storage.

Online Calendars: http://calendar.google.com/ and http://30boxes.com/
Both were very neat to me. I've yet to integrate my schedule into a calendar of any sort. Out of the two, I think 30boxes was more interesting, what with their text style entries ("lunch thursday 12:30") for quick additions to your calendar.

Collaboration: http://diigo.com/
This was very interesting. I saw it coming in handy as Tayoko and I like to research concepts going into our games. Part of the Efencea timeline says that earth ends up being a wasteland, so we went ahead and studied a lot of articles with related topics--from meteor impacts to building a survival kit. I think that research would have gained some efficiency from diigo.

Online Desktops: http://g.ho.st/, http://icloud.com/, and http://www.glidedigital.com/
I'm not sure why you would even want an online computer when you need a computer to use it, but it's still pretty neat. It was interesting that g.ho.st lets you browse to your online desktop then open a browser in your browser--we also found you couldn't open g.ho.st in the internal browser.

Very interesting lists, Vermolius. I never tried yousendit.com, I usually always just use sendspace.com, or my fileave.com account.
I forgot to mention www.wolframalpha.com which is probably one of the most interesting web sites ever.
Some pretty cool sites. The http://sumopaint.com/ site is pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.