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Innovative Website of the Week
The internet has grown a lot over the past ten years and although there are better and more useful websites being developed everyday, they are also getting harder to find. Internet use often gets categorized into the categories of content, communications, commerce, community and search - represented best by sites like Ebay, Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia. This thread will be a good place to share the next wave of websites that are technologically superior to those of the previous generation. Until today, innovation has been the driving force of the internet, and will ultimately shape its future. If you come across a unique and innovative site with potential to be a hit, please submit it to me or one of the mods by PM and we will post the best ones here weekly. Enjoy!
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The concept of this site is very cool and innovative in that the search results are displayed visually. Rather than scrolling through text based search results, this site loads the front page of each result and allows you to flip through it at a glance. The layout is very similar to the album browser found on the iPod touch and iPhone. All you have to do is enter an email to try out the beta, so give it a shot! The best part is that it works smoothly and efficiently...very impressive.
Here is why she thought it was such an awesome site: Try it out! It's a simple and fun way to share music with your friends.
Now, there is a whole new way to create collaborative documents. As we know, more and more applications are migrating from our desktops to the internet. "Cloud computing" is the new concept of creating and sharing information that is resulting in a very innovative approach towards productivity tools.
Google Docs: http://docs.google.com
Of course, leave it to Google to come up with the simplest and most useful tool that gets to the point. I have been using Google Docs for writing essays, creating business proposals, sharing my work schedule with friends, and creating Powerpoint presentations with my group members. It is all web based, so documents can be viewed, edited, stored and shared from any computer with a browser and internet connection. Another nice thing is that files are saved continuously and automatically as you work and you can revert back to any point in the document since it was created. This way you never lose any changes and have total control over the creative process. You can access your document online anywhere you go. Say you started working on an essay at the Burnaby campus and were at the Surrey campus later on, you could hit up the computer lab there and continue working on it right where you left off. You can then "publish" your document which gives you a link you can send to people and they will be able to view the document online and even edit it, without having to download it or worry about compatibility issues. Another great feature is for working on Powerpoint presentations. Your work in progress is shown in the main screen but there is a chat window on the right, so you can talk with your group members, and collaboratively edit the presentation online in real time. Then, when the presentation day comes, you can just "publish" the link and access it off any laptop with an internet connection. It can be opened as a full screen presentation with all the controls that the old Powerpoint has, and with no compatibility issues. Can't say enough about this web based office replacement. In your face Microsoft!
Acrobat (Beta): https://acrobat.com/
Collaboration is a key focus of Acrobat.com. This site is all flash based, so it has a slick interface with an online word processor (like Google docs). Group conferencing with web cams is also available. Users are also able to share their desktop (even across Windows and Mac OS X), provide webcam feeds with audio, and take meeting notes. They can also collaborate on files and request control of one another's computer screens. Acrobat is a little more business oriented and resource intensive so it's not really needed for students but it is definitely a cool site with lots of potential for future uses, especially for PDF files. The site is still in Beta, but should develop into a very useful tool.
Photoshop Express: https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html
Ever wanted to edit pictures online? It kinda sucks that we can use the internet everywhere we go but most computers don't have Photoshop installed. Now, they've created an online version of the photo editing software so that you can upload and edit pictures from anywhere, complete with layers, effects, saturation and hue, etc. Sometimes you get bored and you feel like having some fun with your pictures, so it's nice not to have to open photoshop everytime. Plus you get 2gb of online photo storage, so for people that travel and take pictures it's a great tool that you can access anywhere you go.