I’m having a play with eyeOS after looking at this post again. Tonido has kind of revitalised my interest in Webtops.

I actually really like eyeOS and the fact I can download it and install it on my own server is of course a bonus. I like to be in control of my own data rather than wondering where it might end up.

eyeOS is nice to use – it’s clean and responsive – both important if it’s going to be at all useful. I’m even interested in developing apps for it – I’m going to try using it from work for the next couple of weeks and see how it goes…

There’s not much in it yet but the Jukebox app is kind of cool.

Thanks for reading, and hope to see comments from you in the future.

Haz

Sadly the theme doesn’t work for me either. I was kinda hoping that it was because I was using Linux (non-proprietary drivers/plugins) and not because of Firefox (v3.0.7). I’m left wondering what audience the theme was designed for now (and what the animation actually is)… no IE for me to test it on either, such a shame lol.

Ah see now this is why I thought the open-source was modeled for! I still haven’t had chance to try out the other webtops, but the open-sourced EyeOS seems like the best bet (there’s also Psych Desktop it seems). You could download the code/software, and place it onto a server of your choosing. I’m intending to install (technically upload) EyeOS and Psych Desktop onto my Dell server at home. That way if I enjoy using them, and wish to continue using them I can – My data is mine, and I know it is . 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.

You could argue that it goes against the whole point of web-apps, along with the advantages of storing data onto a remote machine, etc… but well when your going to be the only user of something, why not manage it yourself?

I agree with the two terms you’d like fulfilled, but your right chances are we’ll be given one but not the other (or neither). Open-Sourced solutions that host such applications might have better terms for us. Surely they known what rights they’d like to see, because they fight for them all the time. Granted, they usually fight for freedom of code to be released to all… but surely they understand the value of personal data?

We shall see soon enough what the future brings.

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.