scott.hodson.blog

I played with the YouOS recently. Conceived at MIT, the YouOS emulates an operating system desktop environment within the confines on a web browser. Apps for the YouOS are written in HTML/Javascript/CSS/AJAX and offers some interesting possibilities. All of your session state is stored on a YouOS server so the next time you login you continue where you left off. It’s pretty slow, and the screen UI responsiveness is average at best, but I like the fact that someone is working on something like this.

While I’m not sure a browser-based operating system is really the best way to go, pushing more state, storage, and applications onto a network is becoming more viable as network speed and reliabilities increase. I think Sun Micro has made some great strides in this area, but most apps today are still built as 80-90% desktop with some HTTP/Web service “phone home” calls, or are heavily web browser based with some Javascript or Flash/Java running in the browser. I think we need more convergence between desktop and network application services.

Click on the screenshot above to see a larger version of what some of the running apps look like.