And I'll be the first to say that RIA apps aren't yet the equivalent of their standalone counterparts. Much like that "Gimp is even better than Photoshop" crowd, anyone who tells you that Google Spreadsheet is as good as MS Excel simply hasn't used Excel very much.
But that's not to say that Google Spreadsheet isn't a player. Its price (free) coupled with its web-based collaboration/sharing tools and its ability to edit spreadsheets from anywhere you can find a web browser is a compelling set of features that Excel just isn't gonna match. And in a lot of cases, the advantages of an online spreadsheet are gonna override the rich user experience that you get from real Excel installed on your computer.
And there are a couple of local apps that I've discarded entirely for web-based equivalents. While I still prefer Word and Excel to any web-based replacements, I have uninstalled Outlook in favor of Google Calendar and Yahoo's Deluxe Email.
And all that foreshadowing brings me to a.viary.com, which is a pretty big suite of fully online Flash-based image, vector, and 3D tools, all running in your browser. They're all written in Flex, and they're pretty good. Thus-far, the only two they've released to a closed beta community are "Phoenix", which is a baby-Photoshop image editing tool, and "Peacock", which is a very cool algorithmic pattern making tool.
It'll be interesting to see where this suite goes. For example, could it collaborate with a service like Flickr so I could upload my photos there and then edit and rotate 'em online? Thus-far, a.viary.com has its own picture cloud for image storage, but it'll be interesting to see where it goes.
Also it'll be interesting to see if they go with something like Adobe AIR in case you do want to edit pictures locally or if you're on a laptop that might or might not have a handy internet connection. I'm currently using Twhirl, which is an AIR-based application, and I'm pretty impressed with how smoothly it works despite it actually being a Flash application that's just pretending to be a standalone EXE.
Anyways, I have five beta invites if you'd like to try the system out and its current crop of two available applications. And they're yours if you want one.
But because I am a greedy person, I will state that I'm gonna give priority to those who have signed themselves up to Money Exchange and gotten their free $25 (and the free referral-bucks for me).
Note that I don't actually have the ID's of the folks who have signed up to Money Exchange, so it'll have to be done by the honor system. I can, however, confirm that it does work. I transferred the Money Exchange cash out to my account a couple of days ago, and it's now available for me to spend on loose living.
