Desko vs. EyeOS
I was very happy with the progress I made on Desko today. I can successfully log into GMail and retrieve a list of my emails without downloading the entire inbox. It took me a little while to find the problem and it was quite simple in retrospect. I also made things work a little better while I was at it. I was generally feeling very pleased with the project when Corey sent me a link to eyeOS. It’s an open source online desktop written in PHP. It’s much further along than Desko and has a little community as well. It’s not exactly what I was shooting for but something very close no doubt. I plan to keep working on Desko as I see some differences in our approach. eyeOS seems to want to recreate a bunch of different apps and store them locally. Desko’s purpose is to integrate different apps together. Sure eyeOS is capable of such things but it isn’t the focus from what I gather. Also, I think Desko should be taking a distictively different direction in that it needs to focus on social networking. I want a taggable filesystem and I want to be able to share everything. Not just my files but my instances of webapps and my whole Desko instance if i want. I want to create a community of users and have Desko be the app that allows them to share among themselves. Desko is more than just a dumby replacement of the traditional desktop. Its a way to integrate and organize everything we do. It isn’t just an isolated individual running isolated apps but members of a community communicating and sharing data among themselves via Desko. That data can come from local or remote apps. The idea is to integrate it all together.