jolicloud 1.0

By basd on Aug 11, 2010 | In linux

Back in March or April, I wrote about my trial run with Jolicloud. But of course, I use a lot of apps, I'm pretty much an OpenSUSE person, and equipment failures caused me to end the jolicloud experiment.

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But, as a jolicloud account holder, I recently received an email announcing jolicloud 1.0. I wanted to try it and see what had changed and so I decided to put it on a USB flash drive. Although their USB drive creator didn't work for me, the alternate "manual" USB install worked quite easily -- easier than the OpSu USB drive install.

I am, once again, impressed with the jolicloud approach. They claim that if you add apps to one computer, they are also added to your other jolicloud computers. Wow! As a multi-computer user, this synchronicity would be greatly appreciated.

The little flash drive install is proving very fast, as well -- and it must be small as I have 886 mb free space on my 1 gb drive. (Unfortunately, the flash drive install does not save settings and I have no room on my hard drive for another partition).

The Jolicloud approach is an "it just works" approach. The first surprise was -- if you read my post that preceded this one -- that it immediately fired up my external monitor in the correct mode! This is on the exact same computer that was the basis of my earlier complaining post. Outstanding.

Jolicloud uses -- or perhaps more precisely, revolves around -- Google's Chrome (or rather the Chromium version) browser; and the implementation is fast! I'm not entirely certain what the default applications are, since it may be that the apps initially appearing on my desktop are ones I installed in my earlier test. (Login takes you directly to your Jolicloud online account.) But, at least my desktop reveals a number of useful apps -- OpenOffice, Google Docs, Chromium, VLC and other things that are less interesting to me.

Jolicloud is much more oriented toward social networking than my personal uses, so it has its own internal community; and prominently displays a facebook app. In fact, one can log in via Facebook.

Now, I'm not entirely clear on the Jolicloud business model, but in light of Google's recently announced motto change, "Do--'- Be Evil,"* I have the feeling Jolicloud seeks to tap into the same sort of "channel your experience" business model that Google has been developing. Certainly with integration of Chrome, Facebook, Google Apps., etc., one can see where the commercial marketing strategies are going to enter.

That said, one can easily see the potential of a netbook application that "just works." The interface bears some similarity with KDE's 4.etc netbook efforts. But, having tried both I have to say that Jolicloud's interface knocks the socks off the KDE one. I've found the KDE implementation to be extremely cludgy, especially on the live USB stick version. Jolicloud's user interface flies -- even when launched from the USB stick.

I checked my google calendar and google docs via Jolicloud's Chrome implementation. Works great. The only other thing I did was run the Hulu App. I'm not fond of Hulu because of the commercials -- I much prefer Netflix -- and I had to page through the movies until I got to W just to find one I was casually interested in watching. But on my broadband connection it's pretty easy to say, "who needs tv?" The interface is fast and slick and very quickly I was watching a full screen movie. I have not gotten as good a playback on my "other" computer on which I have tried out Hulu. That's an OpSu 11.2 machine -- but the difference may be the hardware and not the operating system, so I should hold the criticism for later. It will be interesting to see how that hardware fares with the same USB flash drive Jolicloud, which I will check out tomorrow.

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*I reference the recent proposal Google put forward with new BFF Verizon ...

PS -- this was much cleverer in my original draft, where I used "strikethrough" font for the "Don't" of Google's former "Don't Be Evil" -- but somehow the strikethrough evaporated each time I saved the document, or at least was not rendered in my Chromium browser ...