I am quite proud of the work that we did on EveryDesk – a full desktop as a bootable USB key, fully modifiable and adaptable. We are using it in schools, public administrations and companies, where the increased efficiency of Linux makes a difference in making old computers usable again – or helping in the problem of managing PCs that are remote or in hostile environments.
However, this is not enough. You may be without a USB-bootable computer, or you may be using a tablet like an iPad or a Galaxy Pad (something that I see more and more everywhere). In these environments, you may need something more powerful than the apps that are available there – a full Office-like application, or a real desktop browser to access a corporate banking application; maybe you need a specific client for older systems, like the IBM iSeries (the old AS/400) or some special client in Java – on system that do not have java or flash.
For this kind of applications, we are working on a system that embeds a full HTML5 desktop in a FaceBook application, making it accessible from any recent web browser, including the iPad. This way, you can have a full desktop everywhere you go. We hope that it can be of interest; as soon as it is ready, we will release source code and blueprints.
We have prepared a small demo of how it works right now; it is a real screen capture from my own personal EveryDesk/Online instance, done on a normal ADSL line. It should give an idea on how it may work for you.
#1 by davide - October 26th, 2010 at 16:56
It is indeed an interesting thing, but on facebook?? Come on, make it an independent web application, don’t rely on such a ugly platform! Yes it has half billion users, but that doesn’t mean they are the users who’d like to use your platform (not to speak about privacy concerns)
#2 by cdaffara - October 27th, 2010 at 07:09
Dear Davide, first of all many thanks for your comment. EveryDesk/Online is actually an embeddable HTML5 part, and can be made standalone, as part of FaceBook or as
a Google WebApp. When thinking about a demo, actually we asked a sample of the current beta testers, and the overwhelming majority asked for FaceBook first… so we
built it there first.
I am not a big FaceBook fan – apart from the privacy problems, most companies block it internally anyway, so it is not a good “enterprise” solution; I think that in the official
launch it will be provided as a standalone app and as a service for VARs interested in “webify” legacy applications to make them usable through the web.
Carlo Daffara