Submitted by “A FOSSCamp session led by Red Hat developers presented the GNOME Online Desktop project, the nexus of GNOME’s efforts to integrate support for modern web services into the open source desktop environment. As social networking web sites and other Web 2.0 technologies become more pervasive, some believe that desktop computers will increasingly be seen primarily as vehicles for accessing content that resides in the cloud. This shift away from conventional desktop applications will give open source software a bit of an advantage, since web applications are largely platform-neutral. Providing improved web services integration in the desktop environment could theoretically make GNOME a more appealing choice for a growing number of users who depend primarily on web applications.”
Wasn’t this done back in 1997 with the Introduction of Internet Explorer 4.0 and Microsoft’s “Active Desktop”? The bar on the left is very reminiscent of the ‘Channels’ bar that would appear on the desktop of vintage Windows 95 (with IE 4 & Active Desktop) and Windows 98 (and that I used to close immediately.) How funny that this is being hailed as an exciting new concept by Gnome developers. The idea didn’t catch on back then and I doubt it will this time either. I for one like my desktop to remain my own and my web applications left in the web browser where they belong.
Wasn’t this done back in 1997 with the Introduction of Internet Explorer 4.0 and Microsoft’s “Active Desktop”?
Yes it was, and it was a failure because Microsoft didn’t grok the internet and thought that the Windows desktop would end up being the portal and not the browser. They tried again with MSN, and nothing happened. I also seem to remember some people from Ximian talking about the same concept, and one interview I remember from years ago was people talking about the software being free, and then being able to plug into all sorts of web services – free or otherwise. That was circa 2000, 2001 or 2002.
Personally, I’d rather that Gnome started looking after native, rich application developers first, and besides, to be able to use the desktop as a reliable portal for web applications then you need a local web applications framework to handle all eventualities. Rich, local applications are still the bread and butter of anything that wants to be called a desktop.
The ‘Big Board’ concept just looks like the old Dashboard to me; a project that was stillborn.
Although I can understand the motivation for using custom rendering, I’m very skeptical about the value of such significant deviations from conventional GTK interfaces in desktop components for which GTK would be sufficient.
If you’re not using the infrastructure of your desktop from the ground up, inherited, then history and software development has told us that you will have problems. Lots of them. Rolling your own stuff in this way is just bad.
Walters also admitted that the display and underlying logic for some of the Big Board components are tightly coupled, which means that the potential for code reuse is a bit limited.
Quite how they expect this to be adopted then, and by other applications within the desktop, I have absolutely no idea. If there is a DBus API then the desktop infrastructure has to be aware of it to make it available to applications, and they and Gnome have a long way to go to get there. Traditionally, Gnome has just not been good at this.
The idea behind web services isnt just scraping html fragments off of pages and embedding them in your desktop.
Web services allow you to expose parts of your server side code to the net, which can then be consumed by virtually anything.
Good for you. You aren’t the target audience.
In 1997, the Internet was not to most people what it is today. Then it was mostly just a bunch of web pages, a few stores, and not a lot else. Today, to many people, the whole of the Internet (that interests them) is MySpace, Intant Messaging, Photo Sharing, and so on. To mahy of these people, that’s the whole of their computer itself – it’s just a tool to get to those services.
The idea is to offer software to make those users’ experience much better. If you don’t use those things or don’t what the extra software, then simply don’t use it. It’s that simple.
Most of us Linux folks think that crap like the Yahoo toolbar and stuff are useless and do nothing but bloat and destabilize our computers. Despite that, I know numerous people who’d scream bloody murder if I tried to uninstall the toolbar (or one of the many others) from their computer. They use it, they find it convenient, and they want it there.
Good for you. You aren’t the target audience.
Then who is? For years now we’ve had people happily telling us that web applications are going to be pervasive on our desktop, and all we have is Google desktop and that Yahoo toolbar thing.
Today, to many people, the whole of the Internet (that interests them) is MySpace, Intant Messaging, Photo Sharing, and so on.
They all seem to do so quite happily. Integrating these concepts and ‘objects’ into a desktop environment is going to be exceptionally difficult, if not impossible. It has to allow for different services to be plugged in, they will have to have some common structure that enables them to be treated the same and the desktop will have to know how to present the right data to the user whatever is used.
We have Firefox plugins today for this web integration stuff, and they need to be configured to use different set web services. Getting anything meaningful out of them to present to a user is an entirely different matter.
Despite that, I know numerous people who’d scream bloody murder if I tried to uninstall the toolbar (or one of the many others) from their computer.
The vast majority only find the search box useful. I’d hardly call that web application integration.
I don’t understand why they for example just can’t add “Save to google docs” to OpenOffice, why this special sidabar with special “open google docs” buttons?
For flickr upload: integrate with normal “send to” menu function
For gmail: add support to thunderbird (if there isn’t already), or make it more automatic, etc.
Store all the account settings in the user profile. (Ex. when creating your account you provide yahoo, google, microsoft live name and passwd. Add a button for non standard stuff where you just can define the smtp server and so on)
Etc etc. Why not just add on the “online functionality” bit to the existing office applications? Because, seriously, GNOME rocks because of it’s sleek, consistent, HIG respecting interface. Why reinvent the wheel?
Absolutely agree with you. Adding a huge, ugly bar with more than thirty clickable objects doesn’t make the desktop feel any more connected/online. It’s not like I like the idea of this online desktop thing all that much, but if you’re going to do it you could at least do it right. Why add more on-screen stuff when you can use the standard way of doing things?
For years we’ve been told that FOSS is better because you can add functionalities to pretty much any software/app, so why not implement this integration with the online world in a more transparent way?
Well, there are some aspects that would make this technology really cool, a killer really. Besides what you said, what make sense, who would not like to store their desktop preferences on a server and as soon as you login get everything on place, despite being using an other computer? You know, the wallpaper, icons, links, bookmarks and all. If they do it, I’m sold.
PS.: Yes, you must say “save on //sever” to have access to documents you selected.
Online user profiles is a quite neat idea, yes. Something like user.gnome.org which would stores your desktop settings and account settings for other online services, like google docs. When logging in at the computer you would just have to type “[email protected]” instead. I would use something like that!
Maybe even implement it as a community? (Isn’t there already a gnome community web thing btw?)
There have been thoughts about that here and there, dunno about the Gnome infrastructure but I know the KDE 4 configsystem will allow this, and work is going on in that direction.
Exactly. I like the idea of an (optional!) online desktop, but this ugly bar looks like you’ve just opened a browser window, hidden the border and shoved it at the side of the screen. This isn’t “integration” — integration would be making the new technologies fit into the existing infrastructure and workflow.
So far, Windows and OS X haven’t managed to properly integrate contact/user management at a standard desktop user level. GNOME (and OSS in general) could really squeeze themselves into this niche. The only reason that the other proprietary desktops haven’t managed it yet because they are too concerned with making it incompatible and proprietary via .Mac and Windows Live.
Microsoft don’t want to integrate to flickr: they want to integrate into Windows Live Photo Gallery, which I thought I’d made up. Unfortunately, I just checked and it actually exists….
OSS is potentially able to sidestep these problems by integrating all the services equally, and the telepathy framework is getting there for IM services. So my message is: come on GNOME! Stop messing around and just make it work in a sleek, consistent and integrated way, and have it fit into all the existing online services that we’re used to using. If this is done, it might fast become a very attractive desktop for general computer users.
Point is, gnome needs a powerful infrastructure to do that, and I think KDE has a much better position in that area… If we’re going to see real integration of online and offline, I think it’s going to be in KDE – thanks to KIO and GetHotNewStuff2 they’re already way ahead, and it’s much easier to do these things on the KDE infrastructure.
Of course, if you just throw enough money into Gnome, it might happen there – but that would be wasteful. Didn’t stop Red Hat, Novell and Sun in the past, I just hope they will make a sane decision for once…
Nice wallpaper, terrible sidebar.
There’s nothing in there that’s not already available in a better way and at the same time it’s (like said) destroying the whole HIG-thing.
I think the author of the nice blue Fedora wallpaper should be hired by Ubuntu instead and remove the poopy color to make Ubuntu go for world domination, because obviously Red Hat is only interested in undoing the past in a very distasteful way.
eeewww, i dont like this online-desktop crap, if this is the default in 2.22 i’ll be switching DE’s
This isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination; as a previous poster mentions, Active Desktop, Netscape had their own version as well which relied on JavaScript/Java.
I don’t mind if it is ‘offered’ but I will get pissed off if I end up finding the desktop being used a personal billboard for companies to advertise their wares on. The desktop is already slathered with crap by Symantec who INSIST on having a fanfare every time their application launches – lord knows how bad this will be once the advertisers realise the potential of annoying end users on a regular basis.
But I can’t help thinking that the success of Firefox’s revenue stream via Google has had a huge impact on pushing this online shit forward. I understand the need for open source software projects to come up with unique ways of generating funds, but this little black duck will have no part of of it I can assure you. It will be a cold day in hell before my desktop is littered with adds to fund open source software projects.