What desktop?
Remember I said I has something interesting that I wanted to blog in a new post, well here it is…
Wouldn’t it be cool if we could have our desktops and applications (along with files), on the go. Picture this; you’ve just went to your best friends house, you start discussing that new cool program you’ve been using at home. As luck has it, you’ve forgot to take your laptop with you (or even your pen-drive!). Then you think to yourself… “oh wait didn’t I download and store it onto my desktop!”
Now if you said this aloud to your friend, their first reaction would probably be hit you on the head and tell you that you don’t have that with you. Well this is where you could grab their hand before they do it and say, “wait!! Did I say desktop? I meant webtop!”. Thats right, you heard me, a webtop. Like a desktop, but on the web. 
It seems to be the new direction that the web is slowly taking seriously, creating applications that work anywhere, and on any platform. And why not! If you only need to develop something once, and instantly know that you won’t have to port it to make it work on another platform, then so much the better. The developers are happy, as they can work on their favourite machine to make the applications, the customers are happy because they know that no matter what that application will work out-of-the-box on their machine (sorta speak). Its a win-win situation.
Anyways, I’m rambling as usual. Enough talking gibberish, and lets get down to business. Here is what I’ve just uncovered: Web Desktops (or webtops). They’re basically fully working desktops that work straight out of your browser using the usual plugins you already have installed (Flash, Java, etc).
When I say desktop (webtops), what I mean is a fully working environment much like your own computer will be running to view this page. They tend to have things like text-editors, storage medium of some description, word processors, messengers, etc… So when I say webtop, I basically mean an operating system built and designed to run on any ‘usual suspects’ browser (Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome, Opera).
Examples! I think its time I showed you some examples of these. I’ve talked too much. Here are some examples, I’ll review them later once I’ve had time to truely play around with them. The one I’ve used is called “DesktopTwo“… when I first read that title I initially though to myself “god that’s so corny!”. But surely enough, it is what the title says… its your second desktop. In all honesty I could and talk about what it has and what they do all day long, so instead I’ll list down the features and let you try them out yourself:
- Gives you 5GB of FREE storage – to store all your lovely data online.
- Have a text-editor, for writing that quick bit of info down.
- Instant Messenger – which I must point out lets you access the MSN, Gmail and Jabber networks.
- Email client.
- Address book.
- Calander.
- Blogger application – to create a blog account, and start bloggin’ to your newly created “blog_username.blogtwo.com” blog.
- Website editor – which I assume they give you your own website too (albeit on a sub-domain much like the blogger).
- MP3 Player, now I know it tries to search your hard drive for MP3. But I’m unsure if it means your virtual hard-drive or the physical hard-drive of the machine your accessing the website. I couldn’t get it to work, but what do you expect for a piece of software which is still in beta. You might have more luck with it then me (bare in mind I’m using a linux-box).
- RSS Reader.
- Access to their message board through a fancy custom-built application.
- OpenOffice.
- …and other cool stuff.
All-in-all, definitely worth a try. The only beef I have with it, is that it’s designed to run on IE7… but it seems to work on my Firefox 3.0.7 on ubuntu 9.04 (beta) without any hiccups.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed discovering this gem, and many others like it seem to exist. I only tried this one, as it was the first one I saw. There are other one’s, some open-sourced and downloadable for your own server, some use PHP / Ajax mixtures, and others use Flash. I’ll list them down for you in a moment. Give them a try and give me your feedback on them.
- DesktopTwo
- eyeOS
- G.ho.st
- Cloudo
Please check the terms and conditions of each of these sites before using them exclusively. As you never know what they might be doing with your data once you’ve stored them on their servers. Just thought I’d point that out to you all before anyone tries to blame me for anything in the future.
Enjoy my discoveries people on the internets!
Haz
. Plus both are coded using PHP/Ajax, I could make my own apps or features later on and finally contribute to the Open-Source community with something cool.
March 27th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Hi Haz!
Groovy theme – love the uplighting look. The background doesn’t seem to animate on my browser though (FF v3).
This post is interesting because I’ve been observing the convergence of desktop and web applications for some time now.
The thing that troubles me about the inevitable movement of our way of computing onto the cloud is the hazy terms that some companies expect you to agree to when they take your data from you and put it on their servers.
I’m glad you mentioned this at the end of your post and it’s an area that particularly bothers me – especially in light of Facebook’s recent ToS embarrassment and the UK government’s sudden interest in demanding data from the main social networking sites.
I’d be a much bigger fan of moving my data and information onto the Internet so that I could access it from everywhere if I had faith in two things:
1) That I could trust the service provider to keep it safe from other people (including an over-zealous government that seems hell-bent on treating its law-abiding citizens as criminals)
2) That the service provider would destroy my data (including back-ups) if I wished them to do so so that I know that my bank statements (or whatever) couldn’t be harvested by an eventually inevitable system breach.
Sadly neither point is likely to be satisfied. I think any person that buries their head in the sand and tries to ignore these issues will pay for their naivety one way or another.