GC

On The Hunt For A Web Based OS

Today, was a bit of an eye opener (you will get this joke later on in the post) in the web based OS arena. Let’s just say it became clear that everything has really been done before and new ‘things’ just don’t come that easy.

It came apparent to me today that an online based OS had already been done (a couple of times infact) and to a pretty good standard as well, in terms of technological development anyway. There is even a Wikipedia article describing the term WebOS, though there isn’t many terms not on Wikipedia. Pete a colleague on iDAT introduced me to one, which I have forgotten the name of, when I ran my idea past him earlier today. The one Pete showed me was good, but not great. I quickly Googled it to see what else I could uncover and I found it eyeOS an open-source online operating system, if you want to have a play then there is a demo link on their website. It is pretty sick, to be honest, there is allot of technology in use including; video playback, file uploads, office applications, instant messaging, photo management, email and contacts, to name a few. Also other things you don’t notice in an OS that are actually difficult to build like; window management, dragging and dropping files, file management and application management, basically allot of behind the scenes development. It is clear that allot of work has been put into creating this awesome RIA (Rich Internet Application), which is what it is when you boil down to it. It even has a third party application directory.

However no matter how much technology and cool animation you throw at something it doesn’t make it a good product or usable for that matter. What’s really weird is how they all advertise there WebOS’s in the same way ‘take your desktop anywhere’, well yeah but I can do that already with MobileMe. I have my files, photos, bookmarks and contacts what more do I need? apart from some decent applications, but for that I need access to the hardware of my machine thus a WebOS is insufficient, see where I am going here. There are two inherent problems with all the so called WebOS’s out there; one is they are all confined by the sandbox of the users browser, two they all emulate what a current OS does, just not as good. So what’s available on the market thats going to make me use OS X with Firefox to run their ‘OS’, nothing apart from the fact I can use the same desktop anywhere, which I can do already.