"The world is changing and online applications are becoming more and more popular, whether for e-mail or word processing. The developers behind Bigboard and Gnome's 'online desktop' initiative think it's time our desktops started catching up. Read on to find an interview with Colin Walters, more information about Bigboard, the online desktop and the obligatory screencast showing it off!"
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Member since:2005-07-06
so im guessing that its more like a universal sync service, where as long as you have access to a reasonably quick net connection (and with 3G and later, who does not?) the latest version of what your working on will have a copy online as well as offline.
i can see why google made a statement in direction of making https the norm for web access rather then the exception that it is now.
Member since:2005-07-06
> who does not
travel much? many of the places i go to don't have reasonable internet access. we have decent internet access in most first world cities (rural areas still often suck, however; two weeks at my sister's house in rural Washington state was enough to pull my hair out 
but outside of those areas internet access can still be pretty "primitive".
we could, of course, say "who cares?" but then one of the things i've always loved about Free software is that it opens technology to people all over the world.
as long as online interaction is an optional, if integrated, component in the big mix of things then i believe we'll be ok. if online services become central to the experience of modern computing we will inadvertently push back many technology wins in various places of the world.
Member since:2005-10-31
OK so having viewed the demo and seen the screenshots I realize now that it seems to be, atleast so far, not much more than links to various online sites that you may have accounts on already. Not unlike the Flock Social Browser(based on Firefox) I just downloaded which has tons of links to social sites.
It also seems to push this idea of a gnome site to how all of your personal settings and preferences. Now I see the direction being taken I would much rather the Plan9 approach as mentioned in the other approach. Instead of a "portal" tool/side bar, why not focus on improving the fuse/vfs network-mounted-folder capabilities and offer more transparent, yet optional integration with the "gnome desktop". That way there is a wider potential for acceptance through less extra effort.
I just think this may be more misdirected development attention that would best be served on build upon existing infrastructure. But then again this being Open Source, developers are free to work on what they want/are being payed to. Also how does this relate to the stateless desktop that redhat was working on previously?
Member since:
2005-07-17
Pretty much the same way in this case except you wouldn't have access to your online stuff (at least, right now, unless they implement something like Google Gears).
"Online desktop" is what they are calling it but I wouldn't say (in the 30 minutes I played around with it) that it works the way you might think. Rather it pulls together a lot of the online services into one integrated package. You can still do stuff locally as normal.
If you haven't looked at the screencast in the linked article it wouldn't make sense at all - but I think you still have to try it to get it.