I have been waiting for something like a cloud OS since ever now. After an year of announcement of Chrome OS, i was still waiting, untill now. But, in an year a lot of different web apps have come up. With all the heated coffee-time discussions i have had about cloud, there was never a clear answer to the question "whether i can ever expect all standalone-like features in webapps? or am i supposed to ask that question itself?" .Now with the new OSes like jolicloud, its a good time to review some of the webapps that are out there already to give 'that' experience. i am sure there are lots more out there, here are a few of my favs yet.
First of all, the OS jolicloud. I found it to be awesome. Based on Ubuntu 9.04, and uses prism, along with a very intuitive interface. I checked out ubuntu 10.10 netbook with unity interface, but this ones much better, both in terms interface and utilization of cloud . Its also a proper cloud OS where you have a login to jolicloud and your desktop is available to you from any browser at any place. You can also load local softwares and access all of your local resources(other partitions and all), but if your on net all the time, i am sure you wouldn't need to. The boot up time time is also impressive, loads up in 13 sec on my laptop(standard core2duo, 3GB).
After installing jolicloud, i discovered a world of webapps i wasnt aware of!! And surprise..
Here are a few.
Everyone has/had a doubt about having a Photoshop like experience in a webapp, or atleast something close to it. Well, here it is. There are sites like picnic but this is different check it out.
This one is interesting, it literally tiles up the whole real estate of your browser, with the news you want. One cool site.
There are many music sites utilizing the cloud, Grooveshark being one of the nicest ones. But stereomood has music categorized in to mood! Must experience this one. 'thecloudplayer' is another one but it mostly has electronic and remixes created by people, the player itself resembles itunes.
This one may seem like google docs or ms-office online, but its more. Its more feature packed that google docs and free(hence better that office!).It offers spreadsheets(with macro!!!) among other things. But i liked the notebook where one can put text,video, image and anything on it.
This department a plenty options, google docs, zoho , but this one's cool too.Kinda resembles ms and feels like a real standalone presentation app.
This one doesnt have much purpose but its really cool, gives you weather on a google map background!!
Finally, if one doesnt want to install another OS like jolicloud, still can use it by logging in and using it as a homepage. you can install your webapps there and u have your own chrome OS(untill we see the real chrome OS wid the app page!). But surely chromeOS is lucky here, now after using jolicloud i can see the potential of a cloud based OS, Now in jolicloud i have to open chrome separately to browse internet, so it kinda gives me two bars, one for the jolicloud and another chrome tab bar. Its a lil redundant. After using this i can feel why chrome os will be different experience. But in anyway,its the cloud and theres a lot to be discovered!
No comments:
Post a Comment