Great news! Today we've released 3 more apps to our cloud App Collection – all are intuitive, fast, and ready to help you get things done right from your web browser. FBReader is an easy to use ebook reader in the cloud. The app supports popular ebook formats like ePub, fb2, mobi, html, and plain text. Just launch the app and read the books from your cloud storage: Dropbox, Google Drive or Box.
All the features you want from your ebook reader.
File Rollerallows you to view the content of your archives, extract files, create and modify archives. Again, all you need is a browser: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari.
It saves time by opening files faster in cloud storage.
KolourPaint is a powerful raster graphics editor that allows drawing diagrams, editing screenshots, photos, and icons. KolourPaint provides tools for image manipulation and editing, including Brush, Color Eraser, Pen, Polygon, Text, Color Picker, Connected Lines/Polyline, Rectangle, and Zoomed Thumbnail.
Making photo editing a breeze.
What apps do you want to come on rollApp? Let us know!
Artha is a Sanskrit term meaning "purpose, cause, motive, meaning". It also refers to the idea of wealth and prosperity.
Artha is an ease-to-use thesaurus based on WordNet, the large lexical database of English, where nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept, in other words, they are linked semantically. Unlike other dictionaries and thesauruses, Artha on rollApp can be used in your browser – on desktop, iPad or Chromebook. Artha 1.0.3 key features include global hotkey look-up, regular expression based search, spelling suggestions for a misspelled word, i.e. when a misspelled word is queried for, Artha provides near-match suggestions. For a given word, the possible relatives shown by the Artha app includes
About WordNet WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing. WordNet superficially resembles a thesaurus, in that it groups words together based on their meanings. But there are some distinctions. First, WordNet interlinks not just word forms—strings of letters—but specific senses of words. As a result, words that are found in close proximity to one another in the network are semantically disambiguated. Second, WordNet labels the semantic relations among words, whereas the groupings of words in a thesaurus does not follow any explicit pattern other than meaning similarity. Related posts:
While
sipping your morning coffee, an email with an unknown file has arrived into your inbox on
iPad from a friend in Denmark. The friend is asking you to proofread her resume ASAP. No problemo, but unexpectedly Google Drive tells that the file cannot be viewed. Ouch!
So how can
you view the document on iPad? How to save it to your iPad in an easily
accessible way? Maybe convert it to the .doc format but, again, how?
You're
starting to panic. Your coffee is getting cold.
And what if
there’s not only a .doc file you ever need to open, but files of other formats
like .ods, .csv or .rtf – how to quickly preview them?
You go to
refill your coffee and notice that there are still more croissants. You grab
them all.
Your adrenaline is up and suddenly you think to yourself: "iPad is such a magical device and you’re living in the age of technology
so there’s MUST be a solution to that problem." And you’re right!
The
conventional wisdom tells us that we cannot read a file without an app that is
compatible with that file. That's false for the cloud computing era. To view and edit office docs on your iPad all you need is a browser and rollApp.com.
As the iPad
doesn't have a file system, rollApp allows you to work with files (open, save, edit) directly in your
Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box account. So if you want to view a document – that
resume from your friend – just create your rollApp account and connect your favorite cloud storage to it.
Then, using
Chrome or Safari, go to an office app on rollApp.com – for example LibreOffice Writer or OpenOffice Writer, click Launch Online, use File > Open to locale
the file you previously saved in your cloud storage. And you're all set!
Below are
just some major file formats you can open and view with OpenOffice apps via
rollApp on your iPad:
Text
documents:
OpenDocument
formats (.odt, .ott, .oth, and .odm):
Microsoft
Word 6.0/95/97/2000/XP (.doc and .dot)
Microsoft
Word 2003 XML (.xml)
Microsoft
Word 2007 XML (.docx, .docm, .dotx, .dotm)
Microsoft
WinWord 5 (.doc)
WordPerfect
Document (.wpd)
.rtf, .txt,
and .csv Portable Document Format (.pdf)
Spreadsheets:
OpenDocument
formats (.ods and .ots)
Microsoft
Excel 97/2000/XP (.xls, .xlw, and .xlt)
Microsoft
Excel 4.x–5.0/95 (.xls, .xlw, and .xlt)
Microsoft
Excel 2003 XML (.xml)
Microsoft
Excel 2007 XML (.xlsx, .xlsm, .xltx, .xltm)
Microsoft
Excel 2007 binary (.xlsb)
Lotus 1-2-3
(.wk1, .wks, and .123)
Data
Interchange Format (.dif)
Rich Text
Format (.rtf)
Text CSV
(.csv and .txt)
Opening
presentations:
OpenDocument
formats (.odp, .odg, and .otp)
Microsoft
PowerPoint 97/2000/XP (.ppt, .pps, and .pot)
Microsoft
PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx, .pptm, .potx, .potm)
The goal of rollApp is to help people be more productive using a web browser, no matter what hardware they are running.
Surprisingly, during Fall 2013, we've received many new requests, especially from the growing number of Chromebook users, to update our cloud-based Game Collection. You've asked, we've listened. Starting today, in addition to popular and well-recommended games like Mahjongg, GLines, Gweled, and Tanglet, you can play three more games right in your browser.
Hangman The origins of Hangman are obscure, but it seems to have arisen in Victorian times. In the game, the player should guess a word letter by letter. At each miss, the picture of a hangman appears. After 10 tries, if the word is not guessed, the game is over and the answer is displayed. Mastermind Mastermind is a code-breaking game for two players. The goal of this game is to break a hidden color code following the hints that the game gives us. Tali Tali is a sort of poker with dice and less money. You roll five dice three times and try to create the best hand. Your two re-rolls may include any or all of your dice. Want to see more games? Let us know!
Browser-based Inkscape is an incredibly useful vector graphics editor available on rollApp's cloud (enjoy drawing on iPad) and in the Chrome Web Store (perfect for Chromebook owners). It's used in many different ways from creative art and web graphics to technical diagrams and navigation development.
If you are used to working with Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, Inkscape comes with similar capabilities and uses the Scalable Vector Graphics file format supporting many advanced SVG features: markers, clones, alpha blending. Still, the application is more focused on popular vector graphics editing capabilities, including transparency, gradients, node editing, and pattern fills. Inkscape stores its graphics in a vector format but it also can import and display bitmap images. For working with files – right through your browser – you'll able to connect your rollApp account to Google Drive, Dropbox and Box.
"This reduces my need to use my Linux Mint Netbook to some advanced GIMP features." ~ James Kissel
The Inkscape developers are working on the new powerful version of Inkscape 0.49. Stay tuned! Related posts:
So you've just bought a shiny new Chromebook: Samsung, Acer, or HP. Here’s a step-by-step guide of how to get up and running with cloud applications on rollApp.
1. Work online with office apps in Chrome
rollApp offers a suite of Chrome-based office apps that help you be more productive: OpenOffice and LibreOffice. As a rollApp user, you don’t need to install any software on your Chromebook. No downloading. Simply start working within the application in Google Chrome browser:
Select an app and click Launch Online.
You'll be prompted to sign-in to rollApp – don’t freak out about this – we'll make the App Collection work for you in the cloud.
Use File > Save As to save your work. When you launch an online app on rollApp, you have several choices where your files will be saved or opened from: Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive. So you’ll need to connect cloud storage.
2. Open and edit any files directly in Chrome – just put them in your Dropbox first
Looking for more work-related apps for Chrome OS? Browse productivity apps in the Chrome Web Store.
4. Preview almost any file on the web – no software to install
"Did exactly what I needed it to! Opened an rtf. document that my teacher posted online that my CHROMEbook couldn't read! Easy and Fast!" ~ Jillian Revier
Alice Keeler, an adjunct professor of CSU Fresno, Microsoft Innovative Educator Trainer and Google Certified Teacher, recently posted an awesome series of articles about Google Chrome extensions that can help teachers in the classroom. And in the latest post – 5 Chrome Extensions for Teachers: Part 3 – she reviewed rollApp File Opener. Thanks for sharing, Alice, glad you liked it! Let us cross-post your findings here.
rollApp File Opener I am constantly downloading resources from the web. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to download a resource before you can see if it is any good. You can view it of course after you figure out where the heck it downloaded to. RollApp does not fully solve this problem, but it is a huge help. After installing the extension look for the little blue cloud icon near the omnibox. If a webpage has documents that can be downloaded you are able to click on this icon to reveal a list of all the documents that can be downloaded. In the below example I did a Google search for worksheets on the pythagorean theorem.
After clicking on one of the choices from the list of options RollApp launches a viewer in a floating window to allow me to preview the document. This saved me from finding the download links on the page, figuring out where the document downloaded to and then waiting for the Word program to launch. If you do not have office on your computer this will help immensely since the RollApp viewer is it’s own application and does not require Office to be installed on your computer.
When you launch an online application on rollApp, you have several choices where your files will be saved or opened from. Box, an online file storage, is one of those choices. Box allows you to store all kinds of files online and provides access to all your content, right in the browser. For a personal free account, Box offers 10GB secure storage with 250MB file upload size. Nice! So if you're a Box personal or enterprise user who considers working with the App Collection on rollApp, here's how to get started: Go to the Cloud Storage section of your account –rollapp.com/profile/storage– and click Connect New.
In the appeared drop-down list, select Box, change the default folder name if needed, and then click Connect.
You’ll redirected on Box.com where you need to log into your Box account. For this, enter your email and password, and click Log In.
Once done, you'll redirected back to rollApp.com where you'll see a congratulation message. And that's pretty much it – your rollApp account can now work with the files you store in the Box's cloud.
Now, if you need to save or open a file using an office or graphics app on rollApp, use the File > Save As menu command, name the file and indicate the path to your Box folder:
On the next screen, also click Save.
Once a file is saved, you can find it in the All Files and Folders area of your Box account.
During the last couple of years, we've built a vibrant community of LibreOffice users on rollApp, including early adopters and power users. Today, we're bringing the latest version of the LibreOffice online document management applications to rollApp platform.
What's New in LibreOffice Version 4.1 The LibreOffice suite provides word processing, spreadsheets, slides and diagrams. The suite comes with a host of new features and several important improvements under the hood (you can get the full list in therelease notes):
Especially for migrations, LibreOffice adds a number of improvements of interoperability with MS Office formats, onluding .doc and .xls
It's now easy to include a series of photos in Impress with the "Photo Album" feature.
Rotate images in Writer in 90 degree increments
Send along your fonts with your documents. Writer, Calc and Impress now allow embedding fonts in their documents.
Use LibreOffice 4.1.3 in Your Browser on rollApp These browsed-based versions of LibreOffice apps extend access to your documents directly in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Safari. And this is a big deal for LibreOffice users, since you’ll no longer have to install it on your computer, laptop or Chromebook – rollApp will let you open your files and apps right in the browser. Here's where to get started:
About LibreOffice Did you know there’s a fascinating story behind LibreOffice, the free office suite? Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010. In the same year, The Document Foundation was announced as the host of LibreOffice, a new derivative of OpenOffice.org.
LibreOffice Team, Usage and Adoption The LibreOffice ecosystem continues to grow at a steady pace, with an average of over 100 active developersper month since February 2013. These figures tops the cumulative number of over 700 new developers attracted by the project since the announcement on September 28, 2010.
Between January 2011 (the first stable release) and October 2011, LibreOffice was downloaded approximately 7.5 million times. During 2012, the office suite was downloaded about 15 million times (source: Wikipedia). Recently, the Spanish autonomous region of Valencia’s migration to LibreOffice on 120,000 PCs, which will save the government some 1.5 million Euro per year on proprietary software licenses.
Swapnil Bhartiya, the founder and editor of Muktware.com, a growing Linux and Open Source web magazine, today published a short video where he demonstrated his unsuccessful attempt to open an OpenOffice file (.ODT, .ODS, .ODP) on a Samsung Chromebook. Take a look:
(Thank you, Carlos Sanchez, for recommending rollApp!)
Indeed, with Google Drive, you can view some file types online without a dedicated app, including PDFs, Microsoft Office files, and images. But what about OpenOffice file formats, like .ODT?
The solution is simple: use Dropbox and rollApp File Opener. In case of Dropbox, you don't need to install anything on your Chromebook. Just sign-in to www.dropbox.com/ and upload your .ODT files. Then go to the Chrome Web Store and search for rollApp File Opener. Once you've added the extension to Chrome, you can preview virtually any file that you've saved in Dropbox – just hover the mouse over that file and click Open.
As you probably know, with Dropbox you can get a quick preview of files you’ve saved without downloading them on your computer and installing certain software programs to view it. There’s a number of file formats that can be opened natively on Dropbox, including documents, movies, photos, code snippets, downloads (and they add to this list frequently). However, quite often, while trying to open a specific file, you’ll see the following message:
Or simply the Download or Share options, but no preview:
Well, you may get frustrated. That’s
where rollApp File Opener comes in. The browser extension for Firefox and Chrome allows you to preview virtually any file that you've saved in Dropbox – just hover the mouse over that file and click Open.
In other words, this add-on offers a new way that fundamentally simplifies how you access your data and work with your content in your cloud storage.
The following 100+ file types are currently supported by rollApp File Opener:
eBooks: epub, fb2, djvu
ZIP, RAR and other archives
Documents: Microsoft Word files:
doc, docx; Rich Text files: rtf; OpenOffice Writer files: odt; Word Perfect
files: wpd; PDFs and others
"jEdit's design allows you to use it as a simple editor, but also use it as an IDE and expand its functionality via plugins so that it becomes exactly what you want it to be for the task or language at hand." ~ OpenLogic, 2011
Did you know that one of the most popular apps on rollApp is jEdit – a programmer's text editor in the cloud? Whether you're a developer, a coder or webmaster, looking to spend more time actually coding and less time figuring out how to install the app, browser-based jEdit is an interesting alternative that might be worth considering. jEdit beats many premium development tools for features, customization and flexibility so if you're not satisfied with your current text editor, you can become more efficient using jEdit.
And in case of rollApp, you don’t need to worry about running Java VM – we do all the heavy lifting for you – all you need is a browser: Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Plus, it's integrated with Dropbox and Google Drive via your rollApp account.
As a development project, jEdit was started back in 1998 by Slava Pestov, who left it in 2006, handing development to the open software community.
"The strength of jEdit for Java developers comes from the plug-ins contributed by the community..." ~ O'Reilly Media, 2002
jEdit programmer's text editor – key features:
Combines the best functionality of Unix, Windows and MacOS text editors.
Built-in macro language; extensible plugin architecture. Hundreds of macros and plugins available. It also can be further extended with macros written in BeanShell, Jython, JavaScript and some other scripting languages.
Efficient keyboard shortcuts.
Rich set of keyboard commands for manipulating entire words, lines and paragraphs at a time.
Word wrap.
Auto indent, and syntax highlighting for more than 200 languages, including C++, Java, C#, PHP, Perl, Python, Objective-C. Additional formats can be easily added manually using XML files.
Now that rollApp provides a number of free office apps, many users are asking how to use image editing features in the browser. In this post, we'd like to highlight one of the most popular alternatives to Photoshop – GIMP and it's Google Chrome incarnation – GIMP on rollApp.
rollApp users don’t download or install any software. In order to get results faster they simply start working within the application in the browser.
GIMP, a free image editing program for Linux, Windows and Mac, provides a bunch of handy tools and a versatile collection of effects. On a more advanced level it’s used as an expert quality photo retouching software, a mass production image rendering application, or even as an image format converter.
GIMP resides in the web based cloud.
If you’re an avid GIMP user or just need a quick access to a suite of image editing tools, GIMP on rollApp in the Chrome Web Store gives you your own version of GIMP in the cloud. If you do not have an account with rollApp, you'll be asked to create one. We're working to bring GIMP to Firefox and Safari – stay tuned!
Shortly after we introduced subscriptions to our cloud-based applications earlier this fall, some users told us they loved the idea of using cloud apps in the browser but needed more time to explore rollApp. They were not ready to pay right away – so how to unsubscribe, they ask. First of all, there's ALWAYS a free version of our apps. Period. So "Do I have to pay for rollApp?" No. rollApp offers a no-cost, ad-based version for users who don't require advanced usage.
Second, once you started using at least one of our apps, we give you a 14-day ad-free trial to the app(s) you need as well as to all the apps available in our App Collection– but it's up to you to give them a try. Third, once your 14-day trial is over, you'll see ads in your rollApp experience. If you don't like seeing ads, you'll be able to explicitly subscribe to the ad-free access to the apps you love as described on the Pricing page: https://www.rollapp.com/pricing. And lastly, you can always use applications on rollApp free of charge in “free with ads” mode, which will automatically be activated once your ad-free trial is over. So, if you think that cloud applications delivered by rollApp are useful for you, we would encourage you to go ahead and try them during the trial period. There are no hidden charges or anything like that.
Should you decide that rollApp does not suit your needs, you can always delete your account by visiting https://www.rollapp.com/profile and clicking “delete my account”. You can also remove the extension from your Chrome browser anytime by typing "chrome://extensions/" in the address bar. Hope that explains and thanks for using rollApp!
An application launched in the rollApp's cloud requires an Internet connection to be delivered right your computer, tablet or smartphone via a web browser. To save changes or edit files, first of all, you need to connect a cloud storage service: Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net or 4Shared. And that's really easy – go to rollapp.com/profile/storage and click Connect New. Then you usually do one of the following:
To save your work, use the File > Save command.
To safely close the application, use the File > Exit command. It will also ask you to save your work.
But how to save your work in the cloud if the Internet connection is lost? Or, for example, you've accidentally closed an app using the Close button (X), i.e. you close a document without saving changes. Or what to do if you need to restart your computer. Or if you experience a power interruption while you're editing. Don't worry, rollApp has a solution and it's kind of neat. When, for some unexpected reasons, an apps is closed, rollApp will keep it running for you during about 10 minutes in
your rollApp account. During that time you can re-open it from you computer or any
supported device – just make sure you're using the same rollApp account. Then you can find the lost app(s) in the My running apps area, it will also show you the timer (how much time remains for the app recovering), click the app icon to re-launch it:
We hope with the above feature rollApp gives you more flexibility to keep your data and work safely in the cloud.
rollApp File Opener, an extension to Google Chrome, is the smartest way to open files while you surf, allowing you to quickly preview documents, graphics, archives on the web – software not required.
From the Chrome Toolbar, the File Opener will tell you how many files are located on a given page. To open a file, you can now click the blue rollApp File Opener icon in the top right of your browser. It automatically takes files you may want to view and pops them into a message, ready to go.
The new File Opener will save you time when opening files on the web – no need to search the web page to locate the files – with one click, you can open a file you want. But don't take our word for it, here's what our users are saying: "Amazing! I needed this for school work and this helped a lot. Thank you so much!" ~ Christopher "Did exactly what I needed it to! Opened an rtf. document that my teacher posted online that my CHROMEbook couldn't read! Easy and Fast!" ~ Jillian
As you probably know, rollApp streams an on-demand copy of an app from its cloud architecture down to your computer or tablet via a web browser. To save your work using productivity apps such as OpenOffice and LibreOffice, you have to connect your cloud storage with your rollApp account. Once connected, you’ll be able to save and edit your documents via that cloud storage. Currently rollApp supports Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net, and 4Shared.
Here’s what you need to do to get work done:
1. Connect cloud storage Really fast and easy from your rollApp account, just go to rollapp.com/profile/storage and click Connect New.
2. Run an app you need Find it in the App Collection and click the Launch Online button.
3. Save a file to your cloud storage Once the app is launched, go to the File menu and click Save As.
Then select your cloud storage from the list, click it and hit Save. Choose a special folder, if needed.
4. Finish your work by safely closing the app When you've done with editing, always use the File > Exit command to safely close the app: it will ask you to save your work. Important: if your document needs to be saved, i.e. you want to save changes, don't use Close button (X).
rollApp lets you run desktop apps, work with files, get things done - right from the browser. Integrated with Dropbox, Google Drive and Box. Perfect for iPad and Chromebook users. Give it a try and tell us what you think.
