eyeOS Screenshot

This morning, I was feeling adventurous and came across an open-source web suite called eyeOS. We’ve seen webmail in the form of Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! etc. where you can access email through your web browser. We’ve also seen web calendars, rss readers and a multitude of other systems move much of our systems away from desktop applications like Outlook Express.

 

eyeOS takes this one step further and becomes an entire desktop within itself. When you first log in, you’re presented with some desktop icons for calendars, contacts and a ‘home’ folder. (similar to the ‘Documents’ folder in Windows)

There is also a small apple-like dock at the top and a taskbar at the bottom showing open windows. From this dock, and the icons, separate applications like webmail, calendar etc can be opened. Also incorporated into eyeOS is a simple office suite containing a word processor and spreadsheet much like a full commercial OS like Windows.

Icons can be dragged around, as can windows, new icons can be created and applications can be installed within a few clicks. You can upload files into various places and download them later on.

In eyeOS’s own words:

“eyeOS is a new kind of Operating System, where everything resides on a web browser. With eyeOS, you will have your desktop, applications and files always with you, from your home, your college, your office or your neighbour’s house. Just open a web browser, connect to your eyeOS System and access your personal desktop and all your stuff just like you left it last time.”

So what’s so good about eyeOS?

eyeOS is trying to mimic most of the functionality of a windows or mac based machine, particularly the generic everyday software like mail, calendar, rss, and word processing. The reason it’s doing this is the most unique and important selling point: You can log in from another computer, anywhere in the world and all your files and desktop settings are sitting right in front of you.

Most businesses have a computer in the office, many also have a portable laptop for business meetings. When taking this laptop out, we currently have to transfer files, sync data and make sure everything’s working before we set off. With eyeOS, everything is already there. If your laptop is stolen, the information is stored online so a) you’ve not lost any data, and b) the thief doesn’t have access to your data.

eyeOS is also multi-user, every member of staff can have their own log in, their own workspace and you also get instant messaging and internal mail features to keep in touch through the system. It enables you to block access to certain users and remove access to files and data should someone leave the company, a potentially great feature for remote workers.

The future of computers

With software like eyeOS etc. computer processors, memory and disk space are becoming less and less important for the average user. Computer specifications will start to drop as will cost. Smaller laptops will start to become dumb terminals as all processing and the fun stuff is done by the eyeOS server.

High end PCs (and yes.. macs) will still be available,  gamers will still need the hardware, as will graphic designers, CAD programmers and other users of more powerful software, but for general home/office computer use, heavy machinery could be a thing of the past.

I am starting an eyeOS trial run

eyeOS is available for free as a download, but you need to install it on a hosting server yourself. If you wish to use the system internally either for yourself or your business, our hosting packages support it and I will gladly set it up, run the hosting, give you and your staff an over-the-phone training session, offer telephone support for both hosting and system, and regular upgrades as they are released for £300 per year for 1-5 users. Depending on popularity, we withhold the right withdraw the offer at any time. This will not affect customers already using the system.

In other words, get the complete system with updates and weekday telephone support for the equivalent of just £25 per month.

eyeOS official home page

Try it for yourself - eyeOS Demo

More about Cloud Computing

I’m going to help others share this information, it’s not secretive, yet so few know about it.

Assuming you have an office, or a student computer, you want to kit it out with some useful software. It can be costly, your options are: Buy the software outright (costing thousands), Obtain illegal copies of the software (Illegal and often very awkward), or find an alternative.

What would you do?

Let me suggest the alternatives and the answer should be obvious:

Software comparisons

Microsoft Office 2007
(Containing: Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Publisher and Access)

Openoffice Any version
(Containing: Write, Math, Draw, Impress, Calc and Base)

Both have the same basic functions, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and database software. Open office is missing it’s version of outlook, but you can use Thunderbird and Lightening.

Openoffice can open and save Microsoft Office documents and most other formats with ease. Microsoft Office can open MS Office documents but not most of Openoffice’s formats.

Microsoft office offer updates for a few years after sale, once this time is over, you need to pay for an upgrade.

Openoffice offer updates and upgrades for life, all included in the cost.

Microsoft office 2003 costs £280 through Amazon
Openoffice costs nothing… ever…

Antivirus

I’ll keep this one simple as I’ve covered this on another blog. My personal experiences are as follows

Norton

£17.99 through Amazon. Seems to have a habit of slowing down PCs. It has also let through the odd virus on my machine. The first thing I, and my IT professional friends and colleagues remove when they arrive at a call-out. You do need a good antivirus, but I wouldn’t recommend this one.

McAffee

£9.99 from Amazon. Works much faster than Norton, but I have had the odd virus get through it’s scanning process.

AVG

Free from Grisoft. (Free for personal non-commercial, around £25 for commercial) If this is going on your home computer, download the free one. If on work, unfortunately you do technically need to pay, however you get your money’s worth. Easy to setup and then just ignore. It runs itself, updates itself and doesn’t slow down computers very much at all. (Except during a scan, but this can be stopped) It’s very good at preventing virus attacks and has never let a virus onto my computer! My other article about virus scanning is here.

For web based solutions, see Joomla, Wordpress (this blog uses it), osCommerce.

For other ideas for software replacements, do a web search for the software name followed by the words ‘open-source’.

You should see some great recommendations from people using this same method of obtaining free software legally.

If you are UK based and really don’t know where to start, speak to Alan Lord at The Open Learning Centre for training and advice. The cost for one of his seminars is around the cost of one virus scanner. Don’t buy it, use AVG and use the money you saved to get some more great information from the Open Learning Centre. Say I sent you