Saturday, October 1, 2011

Some Chrome Apps I can't live without

                      

Chrome is really amazing when it comes to speed. Its also second to none when it comes to productivity on the web.

Chrome has a web store that hosts many Apps & extensions that make life a lot easier.
A common question that people ask is How is a chrome app different from a bookmark to a website. Well, there's a subtle difference,

  • Some apps are just like 'conveniently located and good-looking' bookmarks
  • Some apps point to chrome specific versions of websites (I've heard New York Times chrome page is quite good)
  • Other apps make use of chrome specific features such as offline storage, notifications etc in innovative ways

Here's a video that explains what apps are essentially.




Back to the point. Here's a list of my favorite chrome apps:-


  • Offline Google Mail
    • This app syncs mails from your GMail account and makes them available offline, all this in the background! It also sports a cool 'ios' look and feel
  • NYTimes
    • Beautiful, All news sites should be like this, makes me feel as if I am reading a magazine. \
  • Entanglement
    • A cool puzzle game, I can't really explain the concept, just give it a shot
  • Flixster
    • Nifty looking app to look at the cast/pictures/trailers and more of latest and upcoming movies
  • Angry Birds
    • These days no compilation of apps is complete without mentioning Angry Birds. This app supports offline game play and uses local storage to store the achievements/scores.
  • Sinuous
    • A simple yet addictive game
  • Quick Note
    • A note taking app

Apart from these apps, there is a multitude of apps for Google products like Gmail, docs, calendar, maps, groups, news, reader, etc etc etc phew!

In a later post I'll cover Chrome extensions which offer different capabilities compared to Apps.