EyeOS 1.2, a web-based operating system, has been released. “We are proud to announce that eyeOS 1.2 has just been released! It’s not just a necessary update on eyeOS 1.x, but also a bunch of new features and applications needed by eyeOS to be really useful for the every day use. Need to send a mail? Well, just open eyeMail. Did your friend send a Microsoft Word file? No problem, eyeOS will open it and allow you to modify it. Want to have multiple groups for family and friends to share information between them? eyeControl 1.2 will let you do that and much more, visually.”
thats actualy a fairly impressive amount of stuff that it can do. not to mention it looks great. good work guys!
The technology is very cool, but I am not why you would need this. I understand that you can keep your documents online, and files, but I do that with Google. At the worst case scenerio, I have a thumb drive, which I keep the stuff I need when I travel. It doesn’t take up very much space to carry around, and with portable apps, I basically have what I need to do the work I need, if I am travelling.
Well you need it because otherwise your ultra powerful dual core PC with gigs of Ram might start to feel like it’s faster than a 286 running Windows 3.1 and that would be bad.
So the eyeOS people have written an “OS” that runs in a browser with loads of javascript to ensure many more years of wasted clock cycles to edit a document or send an email…
It’s definitely a technical achievement and I hope eyeOS devs are having fun working on it…
Indeed. It looks pretty, but I can’t see how it has any practical use.
This whole project strikes me of the ethos: “I did it because I could” (which in itself isn’t a bad reason for homebrew projects but utterly pointless to anyone else)
Nice troll. Windows 3.1. Seriously.
If you’d quit using firefox and choose any other browser with a more advanced engine, you’d realize that javascript is advanced enough to replicate Win95. Almost.
😉
Edited 2007-11-06 04:01 UTC
I could see this being used in a thin client sort of way, possibly.
Yes but with eyeOS, you can host the system in your own servers, not google´s.
With eyeOS you can be the service provider (imagine, for a small business or association) and remain in control (the system is GPLv3’ed)you just need the same LAMP server in which ,for example you host your website or your intranet, on the other hand with google you must be confident they are not going to -accidentally or otherwise- do anything whith the data they host.
Of course google apps are more evolved than eyeOS, but the virtual-web system developed by eyeOS looks like a very interesting foundation within which develop further applications “a la” google docs/calc/presentation.
Edited 2007-11-06 11:47
I hav a different Idea.
You could use this as kiosk, or set up a “system” you can access form any internet cafe, and probably get access to a richer feature set than the average internet cafe does offer you.
Maybe it is not really usable now, but coming more time and faster connections, it is highly likely that someone will find the “killer-usecase” to make this thing really take off.
So, is there a web browser built in to EyeOS? That just sounds silly, if there is.
I’ve 70% of my Windows functionality in portable apps on a USB so I have my own system and tools at any win32 machine I sit infront of. If my own win32 machine needs a reinstall, I just do the base OS and AV install with everything waiting on USB; the big apps can be installed after the rush later if needed.
Portable apps and windows apps that run from a folder without an installer are great.
It looks really cool and works nice. However, I was unable to open a note I placed on the desktop. Perhaps I should have given it an extension, but IMHO the note-taking application should append an extension itself if it needs one.
I was also unable to delete the note I placed on the desktop. I tried deleting by these means:
– selecting the file icon and click Delete (does nothing)
– dragging the file icon to the Trash-icon (just moves the file icon)
– opening the Trash open dragging the file icon into it (also just moves the file icon underneath the Trash window)
So I guess this OS should learn something about keyboard commands and drop targets. Perhaps I might not even expect stuff like this at this time of development, but I thought that with a 2.0-release I might try this more advanced stuff out too.
“So I guess this OS should learn something about keyboard commands and drop targets.”
Keyboard? Who clicks on a keyboard today anyway. 🙂
You’re mentioning a valid point. Most tasks that you could imagine to use eysOS with are bound to keyboard operations, so a good support would be very nice. But I see a problem because usually keys are bound to certain browser functions, so it’s important to check interference here.
Personally, I think the appendix “OS” is a bit misleading here because this “OS” requires an OS running a web server. I would think of eyeOS more as a kind of remote GUI…
There is a project at Sun for porting the Self/Squeak morphic GUI to Javascript and browser (it mostly works with FireFox ) :
http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/index.html
It shows some kind of Smalltalk OS inside a browser.
It is currently insanely slow but one can hope some enhancements with the future ECMAScript 4 which is more JIT-compilation friendly.