13 killer Chrome apps to replace your desktop software - smithspoe1957
When Tim Berners-Lee invented the first base Browser in 1990, information technology was just an application made to read HTML pages passively. Fast-forward to today, and the modern Web web browser has get over a powerful platform in itself—almost a small operating organization, capable of running complex JavaScript computer code and interacting with Flash cud-ins.
Indeed, Web pages have evolved into Net apps, to the point where we can do such of our productivity work in a web browser window without ever having to gift in traditional desktop software.
Just how much work can youvery do from a browser? Could you supersede all of your desktop apps with Chromium-plate extensions, and be no the worse for wear? After testing a bunch of Chrome apps, I found mixed results: Web apps simply aren't studied to be complete replicas of their screen background counterparts. Although these apps have gotten a raft better in the past couple of geezerhood, you might encounter a few peccadilloes, and background package English hawthorn still be the better choice for your unique needs.
That said, if you haven't been keeping a confined sentry connected the growing office of Chromium-plate extensions and Vane apps, you might be pleasantly surprised by our top alternatives to popular desktop software.
Word processing: Google Repulse Documents
No matter what you do for a sustenance, you've probably fatigued some time using a word processor in the late week, probably even in the past 24 hours. Unless you're doing some very complicated bring up, you could ditch your word processing system for Google Drive out right now without missing a flummox. Sure, the interface is different: You'll come up no Medallion of commands and functions at the top of the sort, and you'll see far fewer buttons. But Google Drive's Documents rent you get along whol of the important things, so much arsenic format text, create titles and lists, imbed images into your documents, and more.
If you often find yourself emailing Word files backward and forward, Google Drive might be even better than its background counterparts: You can just invite another mortal to view your document, and you can both edit the document simultaneously, observation each former's cursors at work. ADD Skype to the mix, and it's hardly like on the job in the same room, even if the other person is a Continent away.
Some other writing: Writer and Scratchpad
Compared with Word's too large Ribbon interface, Google Docs feels quite minimalistic. Still, sometimes even a slim toolbar can be distracting. Writer is a Chromium-plate extension (elysian aside Writeroom for Mac) designed to provide a simple, clean, misdirection-free committal to writing environment; it's sportsmanlike a negroid screen with monospaced text and a give-and-take count at the nethermost. You don't have to worry about saving your documents: Writer will suffice that for you, automatically. You don't have to visible an describe, and you don't have to configure anything. Just publish.
If you do neediness to customize the baptistery or open a perpetual user chronicle, Writer will let you. But for those times when you barely want to get some text downwards with a marginal of button-clicking and distraction, Writer is an excellent (and free) tool.
So I've covered longstanding word processing with Google Docs, and foresightful-form distraction-unrestrained piece of writing with Writer. But there's one much type of writing we totally do. Call it scribbling—making little notes throughout the day, jotting down things we don't desire to forget or recording details from a phone call. For times like these, Google's Scratchpad extension is ideal.
When you get across the Scratchpad icon, it opens a tiny window, non different a sticky observe. You can then start a new note and jot whatever is on your mind—your note is saved automatically, and you can easily tell Scratchpad to synchronize with Google Docs so that you consume admittance to your notes from anyplace. Scratchpad also makes creating duplex notes and searching their titles simple. I do indirect request that IT supported the "/" keyboard shortcut for chop-chop selecting the text field, though.
Email: Gmail Offline and Lookout Notifier
If you'atomic number 75 accustomed working with a screen background mail customer like Prospect, switching to a webmail client such as Gmail or Outlook.com may prove to be a little jarring. Both are capable Entanglement apps, but you still may know flimsy delays from time to meter when victimization them. One intriguing alternative is to use Gmail Offline; this Chrome extension puts a completely different face on Gmail, making it more consanguine to the tab version of the service than to the WWW-based one.
As the key out implies, you can use Gmail Offline even with intermittent Web connectivity: It can connect to the service, synchronize messages, and disconnect so you can keep working on the aeroplane or wherever you don't have Net access. But tied with a stable, constant connective, Gmail Offline can serve you as a powerful alternative to a desktop email client. For one thing, it has Gmail's powerful filters, which tail assistant you tame your inbox by automatically organizing incoming email; you configure the filters using the regular Gmail interface. You dismiss also send mail from aggregate "From" addresses, and it supports many of Gmail's regular keyboard shortcuts.
If you prefer to keep your email with Microsoft instead of Google, you could use the Outlook.com Notifier extension to quickly see how many netmail messages are ready and waiting in your Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) inbox. This simple annexe appears as an picture with a counter overlay display the number of unread messages, and it's smart enough to use Chrome's Screen background Notifications feature to display a pop-dormy whenever you receive a spic-and-span message (you can disable this work if you put on't appreciate the unflagging distractions).
Spreadsheets: Google Spreadsheets and Zoho Sheets
Replacing Surpass, the actual standard for spreadsheets, is not as easy arsenic replacing your word processor or electronic mail client. Yes, Google Drive also offers spreadsheets, but there the difference in power and features is much more pronounced. For a immediate example, only open a new Excel spreadsheet on your computer and hold the Page Down clit. You could be scrolling down for proceedings: In Excel 2022, I was able to develop to over 100,000 rows. With Google's Spreadsheets, you'll fail after to a lesser degree a second, since it tops out at 100 rows by nonremittal. If you want more rows, you have to add them manually by clicking a button at the bottom of the spreadsheet—and you amaze just 20 rows at once, though you can change that bad easily. Other Network-based spreadsheet, Zoho Sheets, handles the limited-row military issue more elegantly, transparently adding rows as you scroll down.
Of course, that's just one simple difference, but information technology's a good indication of the unjust, effortless mightiness that Excel offers, versus the however-limited nature of online apps. That said, if you often use spreadsheet macros, you won't feature to do without: Some Google Spreadsheets and Zoho Sheets support big creation. Zoho Sheets supports macro recording and plant with the same VBA (Visual Canonical for Applications) language built into Excel, but its big editor doesn't contain any debugging features (though Google's spreadsheet editor does). Another central difference is that Google offers a Handwriting Gallery where you can browse and borrow other users' macros, which tooshie be a useful timesaver. Both Google and Zoho provide conditional formatting, pivot man tables, and other modern spreadsheet niceties. Google Drive also offers those aforesaid coaction features, to boot.
The rear line connected spreadsheets is that if you don't work with intense data, but you Doctor of Osteopathy work with other people, Google Spreadsheets or Zoho Sheets can probably accomplish what you need. Just if you're doing serious telephone number crunching happening a routine basis, Excel is withal your best bet.
Presentations: SlideRocket, Google Drive, and Prezi
SlideRocket is a Flash-based presentation tool around with a bunch of useful features that cloggy PowerPoint users may appreciate, such as slip transitions, element animations, visualise effects, and Sir Thomas More. SlideRocket makes it easy to pull YouTube videos and Flickr images into your presentment, and the paid version ($24 per substance abuser per month) even offers online presentment analytics. With the analytics, you can see how the online audience reacts to independent slides in your presentation, how long-dated they spent on each slide, and more. And if you're active, you can use SlideRocket Player for iPad, SlideRocket for iPhone, or just a mobile version of the service itself via your Android speech sound's Web browser.
Nonpareil caveat is that SlideRocket makes information technology a little too easy to pull material into your presentment: I used its Flickr search tool to find an image of a kitten, merely was unable to attribute the image to its rightful creator because SlideRocket wouldn't ply any metadata about IT or let me attend its source page. I had to clear Flickr and manually search for the pictur just so that I could the right way course credit its creator, a Flickr user by the screen name of witigonen.
Presentations are well-nig substitutable with slides, but they really don't have to be: If you're trying something new by going away PowerPoint behind, wherefore non leave the very concept of slides behind? Prezi lets you do just now that by treating your presentation as a large canvas, rather than as a collection of part slides. As the presentation plays, it pans across the canvas, zooming in and out at your statement. Finished well, a Prezi presentation can feel more adhesive than a PowerPoint unrivaled; when you're finished watching it, you feel atomic number 3 though you got a true bird's-oculus view of the matter in hand.
If you want to go by the Google road, Google Drive includes a Presentation creature. It isn't Flash-founded, and it includes an interesting Research sidebar that lets you quickly pull in images and some other data from the World Wide Web. If you start a new slide and on the spur of the moment think, "A quote about happiness would go great here," Google's Intro tool makes finding, attributing, and inserting such a quote into your demonstration trivially loose.
United obvious advantage of using these tools terminated PowerPoint is that your audience won't have to download an email attachment to view your introduction—they can just click a link and commence, or you could justified embed the presentation inside an existing foliate atomic number 3 part of your website.
Icon redaction: Pixlr, PicMonkey, and BeFunky
The unchallenged big businessman of desktop image editing is, of course, Photoshop. Simply these years, even Photoshop has an online version, called Photoshop Express. IT is a far yell from the screen background version in damage of magnate, but it can serve you get the basics done. That said, Photoshop Express doesn't whir a handy Chrome extension—not even one that acts A a quick link to the app. That shouldn't block up you from trying it knocked out (it's free), only have's take cardinal options that do come up with Chrome extensions: Pixlr and PicMonkey.
Pixlr's Chromium-plate extension is microscopic more than a shortcut to the Web service (like the Google Drive extension), but this free Flash-based editor program from Autodesk is some compelling and friendly. You behind apace load images from your computer, create new layers, adjust levels, apply personal effects, and use traditional tools such as dodge, burn, smear, and more. Pixlr even has a wand selection instrument, A well as a history panel with a log of trading operations you put up unwrap, just as in Photoshop. For all of its sophistication, notwithstandin, you mustiness remember that Pixlr is stillness Flash-settled—in other words, save often, because information technology may at times freeze or crash. Patc using Pixlr with a stable variation of Chromium-plate and its built-in Dash plug-in, I encountered extraordinary crash that erased all of my work.
For better or for worsened, Pixlr feels similar a traditional prototype editor. If you're sounding for something more along the lines of what you can do with Instagram on your phone, you should check out PicMonkey. This image editor couldn't be simpler to use: Just load your image, and head start selecting edits from the sidebar. The sidebar is biloculate into groups, beginning with basic functions such as cropping and exposure, and then moving on to creative color effects analogous to those in Picasa (Focal B&W, Lomo). It includes a schoolbook tool with scores of fonts (ideal for creating meme-style images), too as various frame options and different textures you nates apply to your photo.
Another fun and simple exposure editor is BeFunky. It's not all that contrastive from PicMonkey: You get a sidebar with tools subdivided into "Effects," which can be subtle, and "Artsy," which are more bungling, transforming your photograph into a watercolor image or something out of a comic. BeFunky's layout feels a little haphazard at multiplication, and it lacks PicMonkey's polished fit and finish, but it is certainly usable. What's nice about combining both tools is that if you can't find the correct creature you need on PicMonkey, you might find information technology on BeFunky. If you just want to take up some fun with a moving picture without erudition to utilisation Photoshop (surgery something corresponding Photoshop), PicMonkey and BeFunky are some great options.
The Take apart-Location Content
If I had to tot upbound this article in two words, I'd say: "It's possible." These years, you really could ditch the lion's share of your desktop software and get your work done with liberate tools right in your browser. Single of the nice things about this physical process is that, unlike switch to a new operative system, it's a gradual one—you don't have to sound out good-bye to Word, Surpass, Outlook, and Photoshop, all in one day. You can part ways slowly, one text file or spreadsheet at a fourth dimension, until one day you find yourself using nothing but free cloud-supported tools.
Because about of us don't work in a emptiness, the biggest question in making such a gradual transition turns verboten to be other people: Is online collaboration important to you and your coworkers? Would your colleagues be elated to accept golf links to Google Docs sort o than email attachments? Would your brass follow okay with you switching to a diametrical email platform? If you can answer "yes" to those questions, your path to using browser-based apps leave equal a legato unrivaled.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we English hawthorn earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more inside information.
Endlessly tweaking his workflow for consolation and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most operational software and websites to make tomorrow come about today.
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/455803/13-killer-chrome-apps-to-replace-your-desktop-software.html
Posted by: smithspoe1957.blogspot.com
0 Response to "13 killer Chrome apps to replace your desktop software - smithspoe1957"
Post a Comment