One of the topics I’ve delved the most into while creating my graduation project last year was web-based applications – “application-like” websites in which you can do tasks that were usually restricted to full-fledged applications you usually have to install on your own computer.

In my opinion, there’s this silent revolution going on, where we’re moving many (but not all) of the tasks we usually need to do on a computer to web-based applications. Researching – and, specially, actually using those applications – made me understand the whole thing a bit better. It’s not just about the Cloud or about social media or whatever Web 2.0 is supposed to be about, it’s also about the fact that web-based applications can be pretty helpful under certain situations – something I learned first-hand when I was almost forced to switch all my in-college text editing to Google Docs, after they uninstalled Open Office from the campus’ computers.

This is a bigger topic and this article about “The Netbook Effect’ on Wired can probably explain it better than I could.

Anyway, it turns out there’s some nifty applications out there. Since I have a list of similar apps I used on my graduation project presentation, and prompted by a question from a friend, I figured I’d post them here in the hopes such a list is useful for someone else. So here it is: a list or raster image (bitmap) editors that are web-based and can be ran from anywhere with no installation. Most of them are based on Flash.

Full-fledged, Photoshop-style image editors:

• Aviary Phoenix
• Pixlr
• SUMO Paint
• Splashup

Simpler, yet very useful image editors:

• Picnik
• Photoshop Express
• Pixer.us
• Pikifx

Tools

• rsizer (extremely useful image resizing tool that uses seam carving)

Experimental stuff

• Bomomo

Have I forgotten something?