Is a ‘WebOS’ a Good Air Application?

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I am not a big fan of WebOSes. I just can’t seem to figure out what all the fuss is about or why I would want my entire desktop trapped inside a browser. But today Stan Schroeder had a roundup of 10 WebOSes and while I’m still not sold (at all) I thought that these WebOS companies and their users might be well served by incorporating Air (the artist formerly known as Apollo).

As far as I can tell the main benefits of the ‘WebOS’ are that you have access to all of your “applications” from anywhere and that you can store a lot of data on someone else’s servers. Other than that, I don’t really get it. And I put applications in quotes because we aren’t just talking about web applications here. We’re talking about web applications running on a fake operating system, running inside a browser.

But in order to get some of the benefits of the WebOS, you have to spend a lot of time changing preferences, uploading files and customizing it to fit your needs. This is where Air might be a good fit. If you can install a WebOS client on your main machine, then easily drag and drop files onto the WebOS or customize the desktop, then it might make the WebOS easier to use when you aren’t on your main machine. If the main benefit of a WebOS is that it’s a portable version of your computer, then Air might let you keep things synched up pretty well between the WebOS and your main OS.

But I still don’t buy the WebOS thing. Not at all.

[tags]WebOS, Rich Internet Applications, Air[/tags]

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  • http://www.brandonellis.org/ Brandon Ellis

    Hey Ryan,
    Ever set up a tent and ‘camped out’ in the living room? That’s the feeling I get about running a webOS on top of an OS. It may sound like a good idea but its not really as fun as the real thing. ;)

  • Ryan Miller

    I’ve tried a few of these webOS thingies and been disappointed. I’m a big fan of online tools. I use Google Docs, Google Notebook, DabbleDB, Google Reader. The problem I’ve seen with these webOSs is they invent all their own new tools, rather than trying to intergrate with existing tools. If anybody has success here it will probably be Google. Having links to all my google tools at the top of my gmail page is really useful. All Google needs to do is take it one step further to create an integrated workspace.

  • http://www.widgetplus.com Mikael Bergkvist

    The whole point of a ‘webos’, is having a suit of interoperable webapps, all doing different aspects of a common theme or a common central task.
    http://www.widgetplus.com is about uploading files and viewing files, and managing files, and it has a set of apps doing various versions, or aspects, of that.
    One app wouldnt be enough, and jumping beteween pages to do it all seemed real shizo, so we made it like a desktop, so that one can jump between one app to another, and keep a natural workflow that way.