More Web 2.0 tools

FotoFlexer is another in an ever expanding list of web 2.0 photo editing tools. This service has a nice interface and quite a detailed range of capabilities. It wouldn’t replace Photoshop, Paintshop Pro or Paint.NET but for quick photo editing it’s ideal.

Writewith is a new text editor available on the web. It offers many of the features that other editor also offers. In addition its claims that “you can upload documents, share with other people, chat, assign tasks, and track everybody’s actions with a comprehensive history”.

If you need to extract text from a pdf file, PDFTextOnline might be the tool for you. It is totally web based and converts PDF text quickly and accurately. It also handles all fonts and languages (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and more)

Office Alternatives update

Things go much faster on the web and this can be clearly seen in some recent developments regarding alternatives to Microsoft Office.

Google has added to its Google Documents portfolio, by adding Google Presentations to the mix. It now offers free alternatives to word, Excel and Powerpoint. All it needs is a gmail account.

IBM Have entered the field and are offering a free office suite, called Lotus Symphony. The package includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program and a presentation builder.

Adobe have entered into the fray and have purchased the very impressive looking Buzzword. Once again it’s free to use.

What’s Microsoft doing in the face of all this activity? Its answer is to make Microsoft Works free to download. This hasn’t happened yet, but is this enough of a response from the current leaders in this area?

Diarmuid

Presentations for free

Don’t have access to Powerpoint or want to make your presentation easily available on the web? What can you do?

Thanks to the ever increasing power of web 2.0 you now have access to free alternatives on the web. Why not try some of the following.

 Thinkfree is one of a new breed of Microsoft Office replacement services on the web and they include a presentation module

 Thumbstacks is a new service that concentrates solely on offering presentations on the web. 

  Zoho is another web based alternative to Microsoft Office.

In all cases your presentations can be viewed online. They all have somewhat differing capabilities, in some cases you can upload existing Powerpoint presentations and some allow you to download presentations to your computer.

Diarmuid