Submitted by Blake Ross helped make Firefox one of the biggest open-source success stories ever. Just wait until you see what he’s up to now. Ross’s [project] is named Parakey. As he describes it, from a user’s point of view, Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he’s building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he’s leading the charge with a simple battle cry: “One interface, not two!”
nice article, nice idea
wait and see
Sounds to me like just another Webdesktop. I don’t think browser Technology realy works well for that… every Webdesktop i tryed is realy a big resource-hog.
From reading the article, it appears what he’s creating is a split-resource system that mirrors itself. By doing this, he has generated a cross platform GUI and services (think Firefox) that stores its data in your local personal storage (My Documents, ~/ etc) and then replicates that manipulated data out to a service on the web. That web service then serves up your data to anyone who visits your URL.
It sounds like the difference is the local version uses a platform-independent GUI toolkit, whereas the remote display may make heavy use of xHTML, CSS and all the other fun web technologies to display and allow you to manipulate pages of data.
This project sounds *very* interesting – especially where third party developers can develop plugins that actually incorporate client applications and web interfaces. This is a lot more than just another “web 2.0 mashup” of existing sites or another blog/wiki/CMS product. I look forward to seeing some public / online demos.
Edited 2006-11-02 11:50
I agree, this project does sound very interesting but I for one remain skeptical. I will certainly monitor with interest but I really hesitate to call it an OS.
WebOSes = dot-com of the early 2000’s.
Yeah. They are just toys. I have tried some of them, but they were unusable – I don’t think that anyone could do real work using web based OS. Connection speed is not an issue – if I have fast link I prefer to set up X11 apps through SSH.
The creator seems to have a clear vision and is capable of transferring it. With previous web-OSes you always had to wonder ‘what’s the point?’. The goal here seems to integrate things into one interface, and then make that available online. One interface for extracting photo’s from your camera, editing them, and uploading them somewhere. And if you use popmail, turning various popmail accounts into one webmail-box with the interface of your choice (because I assume there will be multiple versions for various tasks eventually)..that’s not bad.
Problem is that remote interfaces are never that snappy, and if everything has to be reimplemented (graphics editing programs?) software will be immature once more, if even available. Because it will be just like starting a new OS; chicken and egg problem.
didn’t mit do this too? sometimes it sucks to have too much redundancy, sometimes when you go out to eat don’t you just want one thing and not fifty to choose from?
i think there’s actual use for this project. for example, my laptop broke recently at work. instead of installing outlook, gaim, excel, word, etc, all i did was install a browser which gave me email, instant messaging (meebo.com), office documentation integration.
it’s nice. this project takes it a bit further, it basically takes data off your system and onto a remote server. that’s great because now you don’t need any state on your workstation. you just need a dumb terminal. that’s basically what it is.