In Web we trust

Even though I blog about old PC and Mac hardware, the reality is that I work on between two and four separate computers per day. Often the things I'm actually working on are often stored up there -- on the Internet. If there's a way to do it away from a single PC, via a browser, I'm all for it.

Before I started blogging, I used Pote to write articles. I could write them on a browser and pull the files down when ready to send them to an editor. No smart quotes, but a Microsoft Word autoformat usually took care of it.

(Handy tip: Don't trust/burden your editor with doing the smart quotes. Chances are they'll do them wrong, and even if they do them right -- and I do them right when I edit -- they've got better things to do.)

The new state of the art in terms of online composition is Writely. Google bought the small company behind Writely recently, and at that time the site stopped accepting new users. Now open to new accounts again, Writely is still geared more toward Web writing and blogging (you can publish directly to many blog systems, including Google-owned Blogger of course), but it is a way to write and access your work wherever you have Web access.

Writely's powerful features, in addition to posting to a blog (I'm still not entirely clear on why you'd want to do that, though it does work) include outputting your Writely files as Rich Text Format and even Microsoft Word files. I haven't tested this feature, but if it does work, and if they can get the paragraph indents and smart quotes right, Writely just might be the writer's killer app of the late '00s.

While it's as ubiquitous as toast for breakfast, Web-based e-mail continues to be one of the most important tools in my computing life. I've been using Yahoo! Mail for years now, and the ability to read and write e-mail from any Web-connected computer is pretty much essential to my work and home life. I barely even knew what a traditional mail program like Outlook or Eudora did until about a year ago, and while I finally got one to work on my Powerbook 1400 (don't ask), the whole idea of my e-mail being stuck on a single hard drive is a bit unnerving to say the least.

As far as photos go, sites like the Yahoo-owned Flickr (if you're cool) and Kodak Gallery (if you're me) allow you to store, share and print photos. I haven't delved into them yet, but I can't believe that the kind of storage required to do this is available to mass numbers of people -- and it's definitely something I'd be willing to pay for.

Google is committed to bringing more computing tasks to the Web. In addition to Writely and Gmail, Google also has a spreadsheet program in beta. The spreadsheet and Writely both encourage collaboration. In Writely, for instance, you can release a document for editing by others. And you can track all those changes.

The new Blogger beta, for which users will have to get a Google sign-on (you have one already, don't you?) seems to me to be aimed at businesses; there are provisions for "private blogs," which I imagine can keep sensitive business information within a group and out of the eyes of the casual Web surfer.

Between these Web-based applications and free, open-source software like OpenOffice (we use it at the Daily News), Microsoft has to be re-evaluating its business model. Even http://www.adobe.com/ will be affected. The Gimp program I use to work on photos is free. It may not be as powerful as Photoshop, but it's adequate for what I need -- and you can't beat free.