35 best web apps

Forget downloading native apps: many of the best tools, games and entertainment apps are available for free online – and they work anywhere your browser does.

Keepvid

If you’ve found a YouTube clip you wish you could take on a plane with you, Keepvid offers a tidy solution. Pop the video URL into the box, and a choice of file formats and resolutions are offered for download. Certain sites aren’t supported – you can’t download from iPlayer or 4oD, for example – but it’s a handy tool for grabbing the odd YouTube file.

Instapaper

Bookmarking apps don’t come much better than Instapaper, which allows you to save long-form articles to read later. In a browser, it strips websites back to their component words, allowing you to read articles without any flashy ads. But it’s the Instapaper ecosystem that makes it brilliant: a browser extension allows you to add articles with a single click, with content sent to Android and iOS apps, as well as Kindle devices.

Privacy Palette

Privacy Palette lets you organise discrete privacy functions from one central control panel, such as clearing your browser history, blocking ads, or deciding who can post on your Facebook wall.

Its best feature is the internet ad blocker, which wipes banners from Google and, impressively, pre-roll ads on YouTube – although it isn’t clear how you unblock ads again. The social media privacy features are less impressive, simply directing you to the “settings” section of your Facebook or Google+ accounts.

Small Worlds

Recalling Lemmings, Tetris and Limbo in equal measure, this surreal, pixellated platformer requires nothing more than the directional keys.

In Small Worlds, you progressively illuminate a series of caves, the twist being that the blocky graphics scale out the further you go, gradually revealing more and more of the map.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks offers browser-based finance tracking, allowing users to create customised invoices, send them via their browser and even collect payment through PayPal.

It supports mileage tracking, and an accompanying iOS app allows you to upload photos of receipts for tracking expenses. Businesses with fewer than three clients can use FreshBooks free; monthly access for 25 clients costs $20 (roughly £13). Apps for iPhone and iPad are available, too. Despite the US pricing, FreshBooks is optimised for British businesses; several currencies are supported.

Rdio

Spotify is great, but Rdio offers many of the same features – an ad-free premium version, go-anywhere mobile versions with offline syncing, and support for Sonos and Roku – but it’s the slick, responsive, browser-based player that appeals most. Premium subscriptions cost £5 per month for unlimited streaming, or £10 for unlimited streaming plus mobile access.

Google Play Music

Uploading your own songs to the cloud – rather than streaming them from, say, Spotify’s collection – might feel a little counter-intuitive these days, but Google Play Music is a nifty way to store gigabytes of downloads or ripped CDs.

Like Apple’s iTunes Match – which costs £22 annually – this free service scans your music files and matches them with copies from its own collection, theoretically giving you access to your entire MP3 collection from any device. Drawbacks include the cumbersome Music Manager software and the slow upload process when Google can’t match your music – but these are easily ignored for a full, free backup of all your music.

Fantastic Contraption

Fantastic Contraption is worth a mention for its addictiveness alone. The premise is simple – create a contraption from sticks and wheels to carry an object into a goal zone – but the reality is a hair-tugging simulation of all the things that can go wrong in civil engineering, as your machines pull themselves apart and come tantalisingly close to working before disintegrating. Hours of tooth-grinding fun.

BBC iPlayer Radio

iPlayer might be the BBC’s crown jewel, but iPlayer Radio holds at least as much appeal. Live playback of every BBC radio station, plus the full Desert Island Discs archive and catch-up for recently broadcast programmes, will make your licence fee seem very good value.

Bejeweled 2

Tile-matching puzzle game Bejeweled isn’t especially new, and it isn’t even terribly original, as anyone who’s played Cascade on a Psion device will attest. However, the attention-grabbing graphics and smooth gameplay of the browser version mean that a quick game after dinner will turn into a 2am finish, with your partner wondering what’s happened to you. Don’t introduce it to your children if you ever want to speak to them again.

Why download native apps when brilliant – and free – entertainment, productivity and education services are available on the web? We reveal 35 of the best web apps you can use for free directly in your browser

Quake Live

Quake Live is based on the classic Quake III Arena first-person shooter, and hasn’t lost any of its frenetic appeal in the browser-based version. The smooth, frantic gameplay more than atones for the dated graphics, and those prepared to pay £2 a month can bypass the game’s 30-second ads and queues for popular online arenas, and create their online multiplayer clans. That said, there’s plenty of entertainment on tap for free.

Money Dashboard

Money Dashboard’s interface is uncommonly good, with animated graphs breaking down your monthly spend to allow you to see precisely where your cash is going. Integration with external bank accounts means you don’t need to enter your balance manually, and the clear presentation means even the innumerate will get a clearer picture of their finances.

Clipular

Clipular installs in Chrome to let you take screenshots in the browser – handy for, say, taking dozens of screenshots of web apps for a feature you’re writing for PC Pro. Once installed, press Alt+C to take a screenshot; you can select part of the page or scroll down to capture more. Clippings are saved in your Clipular account – you’ll need to sign in with Facebook or Google – where you can download or edit the image. Clipular even captures the link from where you took the screenshot.

Remember The Milk

Not only does this tool tie in with iOS, Android, Outlook, Twitter, Gmail and more via a range of third-party apps, but each entry in your to-do list can also be edited with tags, locations, a URL and more. You can add tasks to your list via email, and add conditions, such as a “due date”, using a range of hashtagged commands.

Doodle

Trying to get a group of people to commit to a date – whether it’s for a stag weekend or a crucial project meeting – can be next to impossible. Doodle attempts to make the process as simple as possible. Select a number of possible dates for your event, then forward the resulting email to all the people you want to invite. Responses are tracked online, allowing you to see who’s available when. Creating a free account allows you to track responses in more detail, and keep tabs on who has or hasn’t responded.

CloudKafé

We’re all uploading more and more content to the cloud, but, if you’re like us, it’s scattered among different services, with photos on Facebook and Flickr, documents in Google Drive and Dropbox, and so on. CloudKafé lets you connect all these services into one central hub, making it easier to see what you have online and where it’s stored. It’s a useful service, and one that will only get better as support for more websites is added.

PrintWhatYouLike

This ingenious tool lets you select which sections of a web page to print, cutting out extraneous sections such as advertisements and formatting, or other parts of the page that will only waste paper. Easy-to-use settings also make it simple to remove backgrounds and images and adjust font sizes. The trees will appreciate PrintWhatYouLike – as will the person in charge of your company’s paper budget.

Meraki WiFi Stumbler

It may seem a bit silly to use a browser-based app to look for Wi-Fi – after all, you’ll need a connection to use it – but Meraki’s WiFi Stumbler offers access to lots of useful information about connections in the local area, from MAC address and radio type to signal strength and channel number. Handy if you’re trying to avoid interference or troubleshoot.

SpiderOak

Dropbox might be king of the hill for cloud-sharing, but SpiderOak offers a unique feature: absolute security. Every file you upload is encrypted, but since your password is also encrypted client-side, SpiderOak can’t access your files either, even if ordered to by a court. The company calls the approach “zero knowledge”, and it could be the answer for anyone who viewed with horror Dropbox’s 2012 security breach.

ÜberConference

There’s a host of different ways to run video conferences online, but ÜberConference is designed to make virtual meetings run more smoothly. It shows who’s actually on the call and highlights who’s speaking, so you can stop asking “sorry, who said that?”

Also, it offers handy audio controls: one allows you to mute a participant who has annoying background noises, while “ear muffs” stops a caller from hearing, allowing you to make a subtle aside to someone else without them knowing. A basic account is free; paid accounts start at £10 per month and include extra features such as call recording.

Prezi

PowerPoint might be the go-to tool for anyone putting together a corporate presentation, but if Microsoft’s samey visual style leaves you cold, Prezi, with its emphasis on animated navigation and modern themes, is a good alternative. There’s an iPad app, too, but the lack of a downloadable version (besides a static PDF) hampers the appeal.

SlideRocket

A more traditional option for building presentations than Prezi, SlideRocket offers collaborative slideshow creation with a range of decent-looking special effects and pre-designed templates. Presentations can be run directly from the browser, or on iOS devices via an HTML5-based app.

There’s also the option to download presentations to an offline player for times when an internet connection can’t be guaranteed. Not surprisingly, this is where SlideRocket’s £155-per-year premium account comes in.

Why download native apps when brilliant – and free – entertainment, productivity and education services are available on the web? We reveal 35 of the best web apps you can use for free directly in your browser

TiltShiftMaker

Most browser-based photo editors offer a raft of tools; TiltShiftMaker offers only one. It applies graduated, blurred filters to the top and bottom of your images, giving certain scenes – landscapes and citiscapes, in particular – the appearance of adorable toy towns. TiltShiftMaker gives you a certain amount of flexibility, and can work with huge images up to 8,000 x 8,000 and 20MB in size.

AutoCAD WS

AutoCAD WS is designed for users already familiar with editing DWG files – and well used to AutoCAD’s penchant for creating tricky UIs. If your job already involves 3D design, however, AutoCAD WS is part of an incredible ecosystem of apps, desktop applications and this browser app, which works with Google Drive to allow you to work on your files from anywhere.

WordPress

Possibly the ultimate web app: free, open source, endlessly extendable (thanks to a vibrant community of plugin developers), and capable of underpinning virtually any kind of website. WordPress might have been conceived as a CMS for blogs, but web developers will attest that you can do almost anything with a bit of imagination.

An ever-increasing range of out-of-the-box features, such as an easy-to-use media manager, means WordPress is accessible to users with almost any level of technical knowledge.

Dropbox

So obvious we debated whether it should make the list at all, Dropbox remains the standard by which other file-sharing and storage services are judged. The browser interface is just as useful as the heavily integrated desktop application, offering drag-and-drop support for adding files, right-click support for doing things with them and, crucially, 30 days’ access to deleted files.

Google Drive

Another tool for the “blindingly obvious” column, Google Drive is nonetheless the gold standard for browser productivity. Powerful enough to be usable day to day by a single user, it comes into its own when you start working with others. Documents can be edited at the same time by multiple users, or shared for asynchronous editing. Drive’s utility only grows when you integrate it with a Google Apps account.

MailChimp

If your business sends marketing emails, you’ll be hard-pushed to find a better tool than MailChimp. The easy-to-use interface masks a wealth of powerful features to help you communicate with a mailing list, and keep track of how the recipients react to your messages. A useful ecosystem of accompanying apps, plus integration with Google Apps, makes MailChimp phenomenally compelling. It’s free for 2,000 targets, but a paid-for upgrade allows more messages to be sent and adds features.

JAM with Chrome

In this beautiful Google-made app, you pick an instrument from the selection of guitars, keyboards and drum sets, and “play” them in the browser with your keyboard and mouse. When you’ve got the hang of your instrument, you can invite your friends for a virtual jam session.

Why download native apps when brilliant – and free – entertainment, productivity and education services are available on the web? We reveal 35 of the best web apps you can use for free directly in your browser

BioDigital Human

Useful for both students and the medically curious, BioDigital Human is essentially Google Maps for people. Starting with a skeleton – which you can zoom in to and out from – you can add layers of biological complexity, such as a respiratory system, a cardiovascular system and, to the delight of the more childish members of the PC Pro team, a reproductive system. You can then give your hapless experimentee a range of conditions, and read up on ways to diagnose them. The presentation is top-notch, and the premium features (free for 30 days, then $6 – about £4 – a month), such as creating snapshots and an interactive quiz, could be helpful for students.

Codecademy

We’ve written about Codecademy before, and with good reason: it’s a brilliant way to start learning to code. This web app offers online classes in topics such as web fundamentals, PHP, JavaScript, and even bringing it all together to make your very own web app. There are many different code schools online, but we like how Codecademy includes a code practice box on each page, so you can try it out as you go.

Good Noows

Good Noows’ graceful, adjustable user interface allows you to create layouts of your newsfeeds that don’t crowd masses of text onto your screen. If a site’s RSS feed is configured to deliver the entire story, as opposed to only a stub, you can read the entire text without opening another tab.

10 Bullets

The prospect of a Space Invaders clone that limits you to ten shots is underwhelming, but 10 Bullets has a genius twist: the first ship you hit disintegrates into two pieces of shrapnel.

If one of those pieces hits another ship, it turns into three pieces of shrapnel, and so on, until the 20th ship down the line generates almost two dozen shards, obliterating most of the ships on the screen and creating immensely satisfying, score-inflating chain reactions.

Transcribe

Designed to speed up the audio-transcription process, Wreally’s Transcribe lets you upload an MP3 or WAV file to Chrome before it brings up an audio player and a basic text editor. There are few bells and whistles – the player is controlled with only five commands: stop/play, slower, faster, rewind and fast-forward – but it’s easy to use. The app stores audio and text in your browser, meaning it stays put until you clear your cache.

PicMonkey

For those who want to apply quick fixes to their photos, PicMonkey’s interface is brilliant and easy to understand. More demanding users will find advanced tools such as tone curves, but they’ll need to upgrade to PicMonkey’s “Royale” option (roughly £20 per year) to use them. Images can only be opened from your own computer, but, once finished, they can be exported to Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or email.