webapp

Enhance copy and paste with Clipboard

How do you improve a staple function like copy and paste? Simple. Make it smarter.

Clipboard is a content-centric utility designed for copying and saving content on the Web. With Clipboard, you can copy and paste custom elements from any Web page, whether it's images, articles, videos, or a combination of all three. No more worrying about precise highlights and tedious Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, etc. Simply register and log in to the Clipboard site. Clipboard will show you a quick tutorial video on how to add Clipboard to your bookmark bar.

After finding an … Read more

Create word clouds with Wordle

Wordle is a simple Web app that's useful for creating eye-popping "word clouds" just by inputting text.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but with Wordle, a thousand words is worth a word cloud. (Try saying that out loud a thousand times.)

Wordle lets you create custom word clouds like the ones found on blogs and other Internet content sites. A word cloud is a popular visualization of words typically associated with Internet keywords and text data. They are most commonly used to highlight popular or trending terms based on frequency of use and prominence.

In … Read more

Memolane: Take a trip down virtual memory lane

If someone plotted out your life over the past five or so years, what would it look like? What if you could revisit every comment you've posted, every tweet, every photo you've uploaded or was tagged in, and recall every expression of the ups and downs you've made on the Net...all on a single timeline?

Memolane is a Web app that makes walking down memory lane visually interactive and borderline effortless. It extracts each moment you've shared with your online accounts from popular services such as Facebook, Last.fm, Twitter, Foursquare, and more and combines them into one visual timeline. Each tweet/photo/post/scrobble is organized by its respective tag dates, drawn from APIs and then posted as "memos" under each day.

Once you sign in with your various online accounts, Memolane will lay out your content as memos dating all the way back to the first day you activated your account. (Mine dated back to 2005, which was when I first started using Facebook.)

The Memolane timeline can be controlled either by mouse or keyboard. You can swipe through memories by clicking and dragging the memos left and right or by clicking on a timeline segment located at the bottom of the page. Playing with the HTML5-driven interface felt tabletlike and smooth. … Read more

If virtual desktops great, why not used more?

Virtualization analyst Brian Madden asks an excellent question:

If VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) is so great, then why aren't you using it?

It's a really good question, isn't it? Brian observes that however encouraged we are by the progress VDI has made, and however enthused we may be about extending the wins of server virtualization over into the desktop realm, we, personally, are not using desktop virtualization. You don't see analysts and developers doing so. And even the folks you meet from Citrix, Microsoft, Quest, VMware, and Wyse--the people selling VDI, for goodness' sake!--use traditional &… Read more

Google launches Chrome Web Store

Isn't the Chrome Web Store just an online software store? Or a SaaS store? Why don't we use the terms software or SaaS anymore? Not sexy?

Google announced the Chrome Web Store at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. It is a place to find and install programs that run in the Chrome browser, and most likely in the Chrome operating system in the near future. So it's Web-based software. Or SaaS.

Now why do we care about this when we can easily just go to a Web site and accomplish the same … Read more

Makara turns the cloud into a virtual layer

Several months back, I spoke with Issac Roth, CEO of platform-as-a-service start-up WebappVM, about taking advantage of the cloud by moving to a virtual layer approach.

The idea behind this virtual layer is to enable developers to easily take Web applications to cloud environments--be they private, public, hybrid, or elsewhere in the ether.

On Tuesday, Roth and company are announcing the developer edition for their Cloud Application Platform with a newer, catchier name: Makara.

According to Roth, developers want to be able to get their apps up and running quickly but haven't had the ability to do so previously. … Read more

Moving to the virtual layer (and taking advantage of the cloud)

With infrastructure services like Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and VMware making it easy to take advantage of the flexibility, portability, and reduced costs of cloud computing, it seems obvious to jump on the cloud bandwagon for new IT projects.

But, developers are generally left on their own to deal with the pain of deploying their apps to the cloud: configuring application servers, libraries, disk partitions, networking, clustering, service connections, and virtual private networks. After they get their app installed they also need to install management agents that run on top of the application layer.

If you really want to take advantage of the cloud and optimize return on investment, you'll want the on-boarding process to be easy and fast and you won't install that agent. Agent-based solutions are inherently inflexible. Deploying agent-based solutions in a cloud-based environment, which is, by definition, highly flexible, is often like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. In agent-based solutions, hard-coded agents are installed on every machine to monitor the application. If a change to the application configuration occurs--such as the IT department adds a node or upgrades a component--the agents must be updated as well.

Each agent and management server must be configured separately with management and monitoring solutions generally not portable. When every change to an environment requires installation of multiple agents on each server and configuration of multiple management servers, it becomes a tall order to move an application from a traditional infrastructure to the cloud, or from one cloud infrastructure to another: private to public, public to hybrid, or hybrid to private.

How do you get around this so you can actually capitalize on the benefits of cloud computing? Go virtual. Move application management, including easy on-boarding, from above the application stack into the underlying virtual layer, along with the rest of the cloud infrastructure.

I was recently briefed by webappVM CEO Isaac Roth on how the company is pioneering this new approach. He said the virtual path allows you to actually realize all of the flexibility, portability, and reduced costs that come with the promise of cloud computing. … Read more