How to make Apps improve your web experience

There’s no dearth of ways to share files with your peers, be it the archaic email attachment, uploading to a cloud service like Dropbox or Box or a file sharing site like Fileserve. All these sites however, require you to sign up for an account. Ge.tt and Minus are two excellent web apps which make file sharing dead simple. Simple head over to their respective sites (www.minus.com or http://ge.tt), choose the file you want to share and you’ll get a shareable link that you can send to your friend. You can even drag and drop files into the browser tab and the file will instantly start uploading. What’s more, ge.tt lets the recipient start the download even before the file has finished uploading.

Have you ever been reading an article or filling a form on a webpage that you wanted to save for later? While Google Chrome lets you print your web page as a pdf, this functionality is not yet available on all browsers. To remedy this, head over to www.pdfmyrul.com, enter the URL of the webpage you want to save and PDFMyURL does the rest! There’s also a handy bookmarklet available if you don’t want to enter a URL every time.

If you’re looking for a quick and convenient way to jot down ideas, lists and notes while browsing the web, notepad.cc is here to help. It’s a very simple online notepad that lets you jot down text notes (sans any formatting or media) and gives you a shareable link to your note, so you can get back to it later. You can even password protect your notes for added security.

Cryptocat (https://crypto.cat) is an interesting webapp that does one simple thing – it allows you to chat with others securely, as all your chats are encrypted using AES-256 encryption and deleted after one hour of inactivity. Simply choose a name for your chat and invite others to join using the link. Rest assured, someone trying to snoop in on your chat won’t be able to. Mobile apps for iOS and Android are also available, along with an extension for Google Chrome.

Every form of media including documents, images, audio, video and even compressed archives come in a variety of file formats, and compatibility between different formats can be a an issue. www.online-convert.com is a brilliant site that does just that – allows you to convert audio, video, documents, images and ebooks between a bunch of different formats, all for free. It can even generate hashes for your files or text strings, so make sure you have this one bookmarked.

If you need a way to quickly create a screencast for a friend or a colleague, Screenr (www.screenr.com) lets you do so without the need for any additional install. With the click of a single button, Screenr will grab your screen’s activities for you and give you a shareable link that you can share with friends.

We’ve all been in that situation where we’ve come across an interesting article or video on the internet, but don’t have the time to consume it right then. Pocket (formerly Read-It-Later) (www.getpocket.com) and Readability (www.readability.com) are two of the most popular apps that can come to your aid, saving the pages for later reading in a clean, readable format. You can mark articles as favourite or tag pages for easy retrieval. Both services are free and come with mobile apps for iOS and Android.

You’re probably familiar with services like Dropbox and Google Drive that backup your personal files for you. What about your documents, photos and videos on sites like Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Evernote or Picasa? Social Folders (www.socialfolders.me) is a service that works in a way similar to Dropbox, by creating a folder on your computer and syncing your online files in these social networks (and many more) to your desktop. It’s also a handy way to cross post to different websites at once, or to transfer your data from one service to another, like moving all your photos from Flickr to Picasa.

Google Reader is one of the best RSS feed aggregators around, but its default interface leaves a lot to be desired. Feedly (www.feedly.com) is an interesting service available on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, that presents all your feeds from Google Reader, Facebook and Twitter in a very pleasing, magazine like format, complete with a cover page and a ‘Top Stories’ section. You can keep an eye on your Twitter feed, the stock prices for companies you’re following or find websites and blogs similar to the ones you’ve already subscribed to. Feedly also has a great collection of curated content on topics ranging from home decor, visual design, architecture, news and technology. You can search for and add feeds directly from within the app itself.