Into the cloud
Big news in 2009 was “the cloud”, a loosely-applied term that describes a range of things but all of them involving the Internet. In cloud computing businesses rent applications housed in datacenters hundreds of miles away, users use applications that don’t actually exist on their hard drives and store their information on virtual drives that can just as easily be on the other side of the world as on their desktop. And everyone from Amazon to Google to Ubuntu offer some form of cloud services or applications.
While cloud computing is appealing to businesses because it means they don’t have to install, and manage, thousands of individual applications, there are many benefits for the average home and small business user.
For a start, instead of having an email client – and all my email – on one computer stuck to my desk I can take that email with me, on my mobile phone. And when my PC hard disk dies I simply replace it and carry on as before with little or no interruption. The downside, of course, is that I have to trust that whoever has my data is not about to close down and that they treat my information with respect.
Consumer cloud applications
The most obvious cloud service for users is Google’s GMail. There are others but GMail is the standout example. GMail does both POP3 and IMAP email and the best option is to go for the IMAP option because your email, including folders can be accessed froma range of devices, from a PC to a mobile phone,
But Google doesn’t stop there. Google Docs give users aset of free web-based applications that can be used in place of having an expensive Office suite on your desktop. For most users Google Docs is more than adequate for most of their needs.
Alternatives to Google Docs are Zoho Office, which is a comprehensive suite of web-based office tools, or ThinkFree, a basic, but very useful, set of free online applications. Or, you could wait for Microsoft’s Office Online tools to be rreleased which will give you a copy of Microsoft Office online. The advantage of online office suites, apart from low cost, is that they can be used to manage and store documents online, so they are always available to you.
Online storage
Even if you don’t use an online office suite being able to store your documents online has many advantages. The most obvious is that they are always available to you so long as you have an Internet connection. Even if you’re away from your deskt you can log into an online account and retrieve the documents you want.
The standout product in this category is Dropbox, which runs on any all major platforms and works seamlessly with the desktop. When Dropbox is installed it creates a directory on your hard drive. Anything saved into this directory is automatically synchronised with its online storage. And if you have other instances of Dropbox running on another machine, that is synchronised as well.
If you’re a Linux user, particularly Ubuntu, there is an alternative to Dropbox called Ubuntu One. Working on the same principle Ubuntu One synchronises documents with an online storage repository. Ubuntu One works well but is limited to Linux machines so has limited application in multi-OS environments.
Web operating systems
Not content to just use a web-based application? Then you may want to try an entire operating system running online. There are literally tens of web-based operating systems to choose from, each with their own benefits and pitfalls. If you’re interested in giving an online OS a go then you could do worse that trying G.ho.st or EyeOS.
G.ho.st, or the Globally Hosted Operating System, is a free, full-featured virtual operating system that has all of the tools most users would expect in a desktop without actually having to install the OS on their computer. With a free account G.ho.st includes basic tools such as an email client, word processor and notepad as more advanced tools such as a multimedia player. The office suite component of G.ho.st – such as a word processor and spreadsheet application – is provided by another well-known online office suites: Zoho Office and Google Docs.
EyeOS is an an open source project and is available in two versions: one hosted on the Internet and the other available as a download to be installed by users themselves. The quickest way to get a sense of EyeOS is to visit the eyeos.info hosted version, create an account and login.
EyeOS is very streamlined and runs suitably quickly over most Internet connections. Unlike G.ho.st, which appears to include every possible application imaginable, EyeOS is significantly stripped down and because of that is a better performer than G.ho.st. And yet, despite it’s relatively sparse appearance, EyeOS still has a healthy collection of applications to choose from.
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