The other day the fancy laptop turned out to be not so fancy after all and crapped out on me after just a few months, so in the interim I’ve been using the iPhone for surfing duties and comandeering MJ’s computer while she busies herself ranking up on Call of Duty 4, (it sounds great getting your girlfriend into online gaming, until she really gets into it and you can’t get near your Xbox).

A pleasant surprise, however, has been my awakening to the joys of cloud computing. Some time ago I placed all my bookmarks on Firefox’s Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) site after experiencing the pain of rebuilding my surfing experience during the initial move to the laptop, which really paid off during this situation.

Additionally, I’ve been dabbling in image editing with the AMAZING online photoshop-like suite of Aviary tools. This is really impressive stuff, especially the Node-based UI of Peacock for generating effects and really sparks the imagination for what could be available in the future – 3D animation software perhaps?

Lastly I’ve been writing up documents and spreadsheets with Google Docs – something that’s certain to continue even after the computer is fixed as it’s opened up a world of non-static, shared documentation. Having spent the last decade working out of server-based file-management systems like Perforce and jumping in and out of Maya’s referncing system, (not to mention several years tinkering with .html and .php), I find it abhorrent to work on documents static or local.

I’d be interested to know if there are other cloud-based software out there I should be aware of?