Your personal computer, on the web
Reuters
Heres another option for road warriors that believe
in travelling light: Operating systems that run within
the confines of your web browser (Internet Explorer,
Firefox). With such a service, you could access your
data from any internet-connected device, anywhere in
the world since everything would be online.
An online operating system (OLOS), also known as
webOSs, is one that runs inside your web browser and
can contain various features and functions within
it, like online storage space, chat clients, calendar,
MP3 player, RSS reader and so on. Most of these online
operating systems are built using Flash,
which makes the whole experience very intuitive.
Here are three of the most promising ones:
DesktopTwo: Though DesktopTwo (www.desktoptwo.com) is
in the beta stage, you will be astonished with the
features it offers. What you have at your disposal
is 1 GB of online space, website editor, and support
for POP email, blogging and MP3 player to name a few.
You can also read your documents, including file
formats such as pdf, doc (Word files), xls and ppt
(PowerPoint files) and chat directly with other
DesktopTwo
users using the chat client, Live.
Once you sign up at the site you can straightway make
use of your new email address, @desktoptwo.com. To
access your page, simply log in. Here you can choose
to either go in for a windowed, full screen or a
current window view.
Unfortunately, each time we tried to log in while
using both Firefox and IE, we were greeted only by an
error message.
Glide: Glide (www.glidedigital.com) is another
Flash-based online OS that offers features almost
similar to DesktopTwo.
As far as registration goes there are different
options to choose from, including ones that will cost
you money. The free plans include the Free
Individual
and the Free Family plans. While the former offers
300 MB of online space, the latter offers 1 GB of
online space and supports four users. The plans
go all the way up to Family Premium yearly, where
you are offered 8 GB of online space and support for
up to eight users for $149.95 a year. For free
users, during the registration process, you will need
to provide your cellphone number on which you will
receive a six-digit code via SMS.
Goowy: As the site (www.goowy.com) mentions, the
creators chose to call this webOS Goowy so that it can
be playful and easy to remember at the same time.
This is another neat looking web-based operating
system with useful applications and games. Other
features include file-uploading facility, RSS reader,
instant messaging, bookmarks and so on.
To register, you simply need to fill in a few details
on the main page. The whole process is real quick and
within seconds you can access your online OS
page.
Of all the three online OSs we took a look at, we
found this one to be most rich and easy to operate.
But there are a few interface glitches that hopefully
will be fixed soon.
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