Awesome web-based tools.

What’s great nowadays is that you can basically run your computer as a thin client and do a lot of work and entertainment entirely web-based. You’ve probably already been doing it for a while with emails, documents (Google Drive or Office Web), music, games and more. Why not extend those use cases to more complex areas like graphics editing and music creation? Some tools are surprisingly feature-rich and performant. Here are some examples:

• Gravit Designer (aka Corel Vector), a design app for vector-based illustrations and more
• Pixlr, a Photoshop-like editor
• Tridiv, a 3D editor that outputs 3D models as HTML and CSS
• Audiotool, basically a complete DAW in your browser
• smallpdf.com, a nice tool set for a lot of PDF actions (merging, splitting etc.)

Once again: All those tools are web-based which means they are easily accessible from anywhere while the results are stored in the cloud (but can also be downloaded and/or rendered for offline use). Most of them can be used for free as well and are based on Open Source code.

Of course there are downsides, too. Businesses and privacy-savvy people might criticize the idea of storing their data “cloud-first” and not every computer and browser might handle all the features and bigger data assets. Also, in some situations you cannot access the web at all.

However I’m excited for the future and the dawn of new possibilities, especially on the audio side of things (e.g. Web Audio and Web MIDI APIs).

If you know or find a cool web app yourself, please let me know!