How many Web OS's are there?

Filed under: Design, OS Updates, Web services

How many Web OS's are there?

by Victor Agreda, Jr. May 12th 2006

At this point web-based "operating systems" have to fight seemingly insurmountable odds to really work well. There are limits in the codebase (choosing JavaScript versus Flash, or a combo of both, results in a few compromises). There are limits within the browser itself (can't save if the window gets closed, or if the connection goes south). But that's not stopping people from trying. Webby's World has a little blurb about some of these attempts, and mentions a relative newcomer: XIN. I've been playing with Goowy for a while now and find it amusing and useful, not to mention getting better all the time. It's only a matter of time and maturity before the best of these are either acquired or get swept up in a MySpace-esque social vector. Anyone got a particular favorite in this race of could be's? To me they are like fancy cars- nice to look at, but not practical for driving to work every day.

Tags: ajax, dhtml, eyeos, flash, goowy, javascript, wadgetos, web 2.0, web os, Web2.0, WebOs, xin, youos

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

patrick said 7:58PM on 5-14-2006

Why? I just fail to see the usefulness of these. I tooled with goowy for a bit, but it just reminds me of konfabulator/widgets, sitting on my desktop unused most of the time, taking up memory and processor cycles. Feh.

-p-

Mikael said 6:02AM on 5-15-2006

The usefulness can be dsicussed, but in the case of XIN we wanted two things.
One, to be able to quickly develop server apps using javascript and DHTML methodology, and two, to be able to open and run multiple apps on the same page dynamically.
That is, to be able to add or remove them from the workflow by a whim.
XIN merges all open apps into one process, so it takes a lot of the strain from the server as well, and it allows all the apps to communicate between eachother, without any risks of conflicts inbetween them.

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