PC Tonic

With more and more quality cloud based apps coming up, it’s high time for better synchronization between the desktop and  the web. Formerly mentioned tools Adobe AIR and Mozilla Prism do a nice job of seamlessly integrating online services and apps with your desktop. If you weren’t impressed by them, the recently released Google Chrome browser could win you over! Chrome can create desktop shortcuts for your favourite online service, thereby making their access much faster and separating them from your regular surfing stream. In this post, we shall see how to create such applications in Chrome.

1.Get Chrome if you haven’t it already (available for Windows Vista / XP SP 2+ only). At about 8MB, it’s a fairly small download.

2.Open the website whose desktop application you want to create. I’ll be considering Google Reader (Google’s popular online feed reader) for this post.

3.Now click the dropdown menu just to the right of the “address+search” Omni-bar, and select “Create application shortcuts…”.

4.In the new window, select the places (Start Menu, Desktop and Quick Launch) where you want to place the shortcuts to the application. Click OK and you’re ready to go!

These web applications are single files and can be removed by simply deleting the shortcuts. Do note that these applications require you to have Chrome in order to run.

  The Google Reader app – notice the lack of an address bar and other differences from the main browser

Here are some noteworthy online services which you may like to run from your desktop :

Google Docs – Student friendly office suite, with a word processor, presentation tool and spreadsheet

Google Reader – Very popular feed reader

Zoho – Yet another office suite, with so many features and services that’ll blow your mind away!

Sumo Paint – Free online image editing tool, with abundant features for most of the folk

Windows Live SkyDrive – A whopping 25GB of free online storage and backup for you!

Meebo – Instant messenger with support for all major protocols (Yahoo!, Google Talk, Windows Live…)

How’s this going to HELP me actually?

You could save a hell LOT of hard drive space by removing installed software and using the online replacements instead (which are tiny shortcuts and hardly take up any space)! This requires you to have full time internet access, but then your data will be safe online and accessible from anywhere in the world! If you somehow lose your internet connection, just plug in your PortableApps thumb drive and use your required tool.

Just a precaution…

If you’re going to create a bunch of such applications right now, make sure that your clean Chrome’s browser cache every 4-5 days, or your shortcuts may get problematic.