One of the most important recent developments in consumer technology has been the dramatic improvement in Web-based applications. These are software programs that aren't installed on your own PC, but live on a company's server and are accessed using a Web browser.
Such Web-based software has existed for years, but it was clumsy, slow and simplistic -- no match for locally installed software. Common techniques, such as dragging items around the screen, were impossible. Seeing the results of an action often required the Web page to reload.
Now, developers are churning out Web-based applications that are so fast, rich and smooth they can hardly be distinguished from standard programs. And because they live online, these Web applications can be constantly updated; can run on both Windows and Mac computers; and can be easily integrated with other Web sites and services.
One of the best examples of these slick new Web-based application is Picnik, a sophisticated, photo-editing application offered free of charge at picnik.com. I have been testing Picnik and I like it a lot. It's a fast and impressive program for tweaking and improving your photos, then posting them to popular photo Web sites, saving them to your own computer, emailing them, or even printing them.
Picnik, which comes from a small Seattle company called Bitnik, isn't meant to compete with Adobe Photoshop, or to serve professional photographers or dedicated hobbyists. Instead, it's for the same casual photographer who would use the limited editing tools in Apple's iPhoto or Microsoft's Windows Vista Photo Gallery.
Picnik isn't a place to store your pictures, or a way to organize them -- yet. The company says it will consider adding these features down the road. For now, it is focused on being an editing complement to popular Web services -- such as Yahoo's Flickr, Google's Picasa Web Albums, and the independent Facebook -- that already allow for storing and organizing photos. You could also easily use it as the main editor for photos you store on your hard disk.