16 BEST cloud apps you should be using right now

We’re becoming addicted to living our lives online. Every month, the British broadband network shifts as much data as you’d find in a billion copies of the complete Encyclopedia Britannica, and much of that is accounted for by online applications, with suites like Google Docs and Office 365, banking apps and map services occupying more and more of our time.

The great thing about the reliability of the modern high-speed internet is that it’s encouraging an increasing number of developers to produce online-only applications, which means more choice for end users – and, potentially, more confusion as we have to pick between them.

That’s why we’ve picked out 16 top cloud applications that are ready to replace your locally-installed software. We use them in our regular working lives – and so should you.

Wave Accounting

If you’re still casting around for a decent replacement for Microsoft Money, check out the free Wave Accounting. It lets you create budgets and download banking transactions so you can see how you’re performing against each metric. It also lets you store your receipts online, with a companion app for iOS and Android making it easy to scan them on the spot rather than having to stash them in your wallet until you get home.

The handy overview screens that provide a snapshot of your net worth are supplemented by income statements and transaction reports, and you can also track the performance of an investment portfolio, with daily updates on the movement of each stock, cost and market value, and your overall return.

Wave keeps itself afloat by integrating coupons and offers, but there’s no compulsion to take them up and the system works just fine without them, which makes us wonder whether there will ever again be a market for a full-blown paid-for offline app for managing household accounts.

Copy

Dropbox and Box.net finally have some serious competition, in the shape of Copy. Its entry-level account stretches to a generous 15GB of free storage, which contrasts favourably with Dropbox’s 2GB and Box.net’s 10GB. The really clever bit, though, comes when you see how it accounts for shared files. Share a 10GB folder on Dropbox with a friend, for example, and the full 10GB will be deducted from both users’ accounts, not just from the one who originally shared the files.

Do the same on Copy and the 10GB deduction will be split across all participants. So, if you share the folder with one other person you each see your free space drop by 5GB. Share it with three others and you each lose 2.5GB. Share it with nine people and you all lose just 1GB each, leaving a full 14GB of your starting balance free to use.

Everything you store on Copy is protected – both on the server and during transfer – using AES 256-bit encryption, and there’s even a free small business plan for teams of up to five users. It has clients for Windows, OS X, Android and Linux, and if you sign up using the referal code https://copy.com?r=uRcz8b you get a bonus 5GB, which means your free account will start at 20GB.

Pixlr

If you haven’t come across Pixlr before, prepare to be amazed. It’s a fully-featured photo editing suite with an accomplished brush editor, gradients and common Photoshop tools like sharpening, dodging and softening. It even takes layers in its stride so you can perform non-destructive edits with full control over opacity, blending modes and masks to selectively obscure certain parts of an overlaying layer.

You can open images directly from your computer, a URL or a library like Google Drive. Once you’ve finished work you can save out the results to your PC, Flickr, Facebook or Picasa.

It’s perfect for beginners who need to quickly improve a few snaps before publishing them online, but even advanced users should find much to like here with a distinctly Photoshop-esque workflow that will feel immediately familiar. As it’s Flash based you’ll either need to have the Flash Player installed or be using the Chrome browser.

Draft

This tool lets you co-operate with others on writing a document, providing you with the changes they’ve made and letting you OK each one individually or en masse. It lines up the collaborator’s document next to your own and lets you pick what you want from each.

When writing, Draft uses Markdown, a syntax-based system where you surround content with asterisks to make it bold and underscores to make it italic, precede it with hashes to mark out a heading, dashes for bulleted lists and so on. They’re converted to regular formatting when you come to export your work, so you can quickly knock out structured text without breaking your flow to grab your mouse.

We like the smart, knocked-back interface, default font and clever online file manager. There’s even a professional copy-editing service built-in, so you can send your document off for a quick read through by college-educated editors.

It’s easy to invite people to collaborate on a document, and they can then make changes, or just make comments. You get notifications of edits by email, so you know what’s going on at all times. It’s a useful tool for those who need to work together.

Prezi

Describing itself as a cross between a presentation tool and a digital whiteboard, Prezi lets you create slides and collaborate with online team members. It’s gaining around a million new users a month right now, who between them have viewed a massive 500 million presentations.

A free public account gives you 100MB of storage and lets you edit and share presentations, but there are advanced paid-for options that let you add your own logo, keep your presentations private and download a client for offline editing.

It produces a series of zooming decks that are more dynamic than a static PowerPoint presentation, and the result is a more tactile, engaging experience that helps you to understand the links between related concepts within a subject. It’s one of the freshest takes we’ve seen for quite a while on the whole idea of group presentations.

Waze

Satnav is great… until it directs you to the back of a huge queue just after you’ve passed your last chance to turn off the motorway. Waze aims to put an end to that by tracking tailbacks so you can effectively route around them to save both time and fuel.

You can view a live map with current disruptions in place at waze.com but to get the most out of it you should install the free iOS, Android or Windows Phone app on your smartphone and leave it running as you drive around. This monitors your progress and passively sends back reports to the Waze cloud servers so they can identify traffic blackspots and use them to warn other local users.

It’s the easiest way yet to give back to the online community, while personally benefitting from everyone else’s delays.

Rdio

One of Rdio’s high points is the look and feel of it desktop player, which is slicker and more attractive than rival Spotify. Charges apply after your free first month of streaming, and start at £4.99 a month for unlimited web-based use without adverts, £9.99 a month if you also want to be able to stream to a mobile device, Sonos or Roku, and £17.99 a month for a family account, which gives you two full subscriptions, including mobile use, and discounts for further family members when they join up.

Rdio has a library of over 20 million tracks, which you can either play in your preferred order or have the service mix up as a personalised radio station based on your tastes. We’ve found these stations to pretty effectively reflect our own choices whenever we’ve used them. You can follow other users, too – many of them famous names – to see what they’re listening to, and stream the same tracks yourself, which is a great way to discover new acts.

Amazon Music

Apple, Google and Amazon have all jumped on this particular bandwagon, but we believe that Amazon may just have the edge on account of the fact that it’s already digitised the vast majority of your CD purchases, past and present, so they’re ready to be streamed right away.

It works through a browser or dedicated apps, and you can also download tracks to play locally or copy to a media app on your smartphone or tablet. Free accounts give you access to MP3s for every eligible track you’ve bought from Amazon either digitally or on CD since 1999, plus space to import a further 250. If you need more than this, sign up for an annually-renewable premium account, which lets you store up to 250,000 tracks online at a time.

CrashPlan

If ever there was a time when you could get away with saying ‘no-brainer’ it would relate to online backup. Keeping your PC connected to an external drive for backups is fine until you have a fire or flood, at which point you’re likely to lose both your original files and your keepsafe copies. Switching to an online model means your digital assets are stored on servers that are themselves backed up, thousands of miles away.

CrashPlan has free backup clients for Windows and OS X, which work even if you don’t want to pay a subscription by allowing you to back up to another machine on your network. Online storage starts at $3.96 (£2.45) a month for unlimited space with passive continuous backups, which means if disaster strikes you should only lose the most recent few minutes’-worth of work. Data is stored using 448-bit encryption once it reaches the server, and sent using 128-bit AES.

When it comes to restoring your files you can either download them through a browser or navigate server-based directories through the CrashPlan client. If you like to do things the old fashioned way or you simply have too much data to retrieve you can optionally have it couriered to your door on a hard drive, for $164.99 (£102.21).

Backup is boring, and if it’s not done right it’s both tedious and a potential waste of time. Fortunately, shifting it all into the cloud involves a one-time setup and, unless disaster strikes, is a true set-and-forget operation.

WeVideo

This online movie maker has 20 built in themes to get you started, and a choice of three different interfaces that you can switch between as your confidence grows. Your videos are stored online so you can easily collaborate with other users, and it has companion apps for iPhone, iPad and Android devices that let you quickly capture footage and upload it to your account so it’s ready and waiting when you next log on.

Insync

If you find yourself wedded to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, you’ll know that the service has two shortcomings. First, all of your data is stored on Google Drive, so if you lose your connection you can’t carry on working. Second, you have no local copies of your files. Google’s synchronisation tool doesn’t actually synchronise your Google Drive documents to your PC or Mac – it simply creates a series of links on your local machine that opens them in the browser in the regular Google applications.

Insync overcomes both of these problems by copying down each of your Google files to your local machine, optionally converting them to Microsoft Office formats. That means you can work on them even when you don’t have a network connection, and the changes will be synchronised back to the server the next time you log on.

Moreover, by synchronising and converting your files in this way it creates true local copies of your documents rather than simply links to them, which means that should your account ever become inaccessible, or someone gains access and causes damage, you’ll still have a copy of all of your vital data to hand.

Pricing depends on your Google Account type. You can try it free for 15 days, after which ‘consumers’ must pay a one-off $10 (£6.19) fee for lifetime synchronisation, while for business users who are hosting their own domains on Google Apps it’s $10 a year to cover up to three Google Accounts, either of which strikes us as great value for money.

Draw.io

Draw.io is one of the many cloud applications that can store its data in your Google Drive account. It’s a tool for creating technical drawings, of the kind you’ll frequently see used to describe an organisation, process or network.

The default workspace includes an array of common symbols such as clouds, people, arrows, rounded rectangles and so on, each of which can be dragged onto your document canvas. Grab handles on the sides and corners lets you reposition and resize them to get the precise layout you’re after, and you can add text, colours, gradients and images imported from your local computer.

The results are saved as XML by default, so they’re highly portable, but if you prefer you can alternatively export them in a range of common formats including PNG, PDF and SVG.

Wunderlist

The key responsibility of a task manager – and the one criteria on which it will live or die – is its ability to keep you aware of all of your current jobs wherever you happen to be. Wunderlist fulfils that role more than any other, with dedicated clients for Windows, OS X, Chrome OS, iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Windows Phone, Android tablet and Android smartphones. You can also log in through a regular browser and maintain your task list online.

As well as allowing you to knock out quick one-line reminders, Wunderlist lets you add notes to more fully describe what needs doing (including sub-tasks that should be completed before an overall job can be started), set reminders and fix due dates. You can group them into discrete lists, and thus keep your personal and business jobs separate, and view both impending deadlines and jobs that need to be done within the next week for a better overview of what’s coming over the horizon.

You can share lists by email and print them out, and invite friends to contribute to your list, at which point they’ll be able to add to, delete from and check off items, making it a first class tool not only for personal reminders, but for organising working groups, too.

HootSuite

If you’re having trouble keeping up with all of your social media accounts, roll them into a single app with Hootsuite, which lets you keep track of five at a time on its free plan, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and up to two RSS feeds. If you need more than that you’ll need to pay for a Pro account, which starts at £7.19 a month and is aimed more at those who use social media as part of their daily work.

Since Twitter bought Tweetdeck and removed the Facebook integration, this is one of the best tools going for keeping a handle on your social world without scooting from app to app and site to site.

Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader

You can thank Apple for this one. Its insistence that any third-parties that sell products through the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch pay it 30% commission has been cited as the inspiration for Amazon creating a browser based reading app, rather than relying entirely on App Store approval for the iOS edition. The result benefits everyone, not only Apple users, as it lets you access your Kindle library through any browser on any device.

Past purchases are immediately ready for reading and, if you’ve left Wi-Fi active on your hardware Kindle or a Kindle app running on your iOS or Android device, you’ll see your current bookmarks, annotations and progress, so books will open up on your current page. If you need to read anything offline – perhaps on your daily commute or a flight – you can download books to your browser cache by right-clicking a cover and selecting Download and Pin Book.

The presentation is tidy and businesslike, with a small selection of text sizes, background colours and margin widths to choose from, as well as options for single or dual column layouts. There are keyboard shortcuts for turning the pages, so you don’t need to keep your mouse in your hand the whole time you’re reading.

The only downside is that you can’t read books that you didn’t originally buy from Amazon through the cloud reader, so if you side-loaded anything onto your physical Kindle by dragging it on over USB it won’t be represented here. For mainstream fiction and non-fiction, though, it’s a great way to keep on top of your reading pile when you find yourself with a few spare moments and no Kindle to hand.

Pocket

Pocket lets you save web pages you need to read but don’t have time to look at right away. They’re stored in your online Pocket account from which you can read them through a regular browser or synchronise them to various client applications for Windows, OS X, Chrome, iOS and Android. Rather neatly it’s also been integrated with the latest raft of e-readers from Kobo, which you can pick up in WHSmith. That means you can read your stored content on an e-ink screen.

It doesn’t just save down the HTML and CSS underpinning your articles and reproduce them wholesale, though: it goes further than this, and reformats them for distraction-free reading, retaining any embedded images but stripping out the surrounding adverts and other page furniture.

Once you’ve completed an article you can either delete it or store it in your archive, at which point it’s removed from your Pocket queue, but retained for future reference. A built in search engine and tag system makes it easy to find both new and old stored content, and the service is free, allowing you to clip an unlimited range of content.

To this end, very prolific hoarders of online content will likely welcome the new highlights feature in the latest update – Pocket 5.0 – which picks out trending, ‘impactful’, long or short reads, so you should never have trouble finding the best content from your library to fill a gap on a long commute.