Web Apps: How far would you go?
by Celine Roque
The past few years have seen the explosion of web applications in every area imaginable, from creating documents, to keeping tabs on your money, to organizing your travel arrangements and so on. If there’s a desktop application that does it, chances are, there’s a web-based equivalent – even resource-intensive tasks such as image and video editing.
Personally, I’ve tried using web-based office apps, calendars, collaboration tools, invoicing, messaging, image editing, email, mind-mapping, news feeds, and many others. Most of them were just out of curiosity, but a few have stuck and have taken over as my primary tool for their purpose. Having a genuine interest in this space, I’m open to trying anything that comes my way. However, there are some web apps that I don’t think I could consider using on a regular basis, at least for now.
Examples of these are password managers and variants of a WebOS. The first one certainly bothers me in terms of security. While their system’s security will most certainly put my personal computer to shame, there’s still no such thing as hack-free. And being an identified repository of prized information, online password managers will be prone to attacks, whether for profit or for sport.
As for the WebOS concept, I’m sure some frequent travelers will find it useful and convenient to have a virtual operating system that can go with them anywhere. However, I personally don’t see them as a need but as a superfluous layer of abstraction – a WebOS runs inside a browser, which runs inside a traditional operating system. Also, they cannot by themselves detect hardware. I can only see myself using these if I couldn’t take my laptop to an isolated place, and I’ll have to use multiple computers running an unfamiliar OS, like an obscure Linux distribution. But what’s the chance of that?
We all have our own preferences, so I’d like to ask everyone about your own personal limits when it comes to using web applications and why, or are you willing to replace all your desktop programs with web-based equivalents?
