YouOS

Just when you thought the internet couldn’t get more bizzare, out comes: the first ever online operating system.

I decided to give it a go, first using a guest account, and then signing up to a members account. If you create your own personal account, anything you save whilst logged in, will still be there when you next log in, even if you’re on the other side of the world!

The main page boasts:

• Access from anywhere.
  Create a document at an office computer, drive home, continue right from where you left off.
• Built-in sharing.
  Instantly share music, documents and more with your buddies.
• An application community.
  Everyone from professional software engineers to highschool age programmers can participate at no cost. Choose from a growing list of over 150 applications developed by our users.

First, I tried out the Rich Text Editor (which took a little while to open but not too long) and it handled cyrillic/latin (that’s Russian and English to most people) fine and saving it (although you have to open it from within the RTE and can’t do as you would with Windows and double-click) but again, it took a little while to do this. Saying that, it is only an online OS, so is doing pretty well in my opinion so far!

Back to point number 3 above, I thought I would see what other applications there were besides what you’d expect, as the File Explorer/Trash Can worked as one would expect.

As it has only been around for 6 months, and is therefore relatively new, there isn’t a whole lot of choice when it comes to applications, and some are just a little strange!

There are 2 browsers:

• Bitty Browser, which is a simple text browser allowing you to go back. forwards, and search google. Very Useful for all you ad haters out there!
• YouBrowser, which works like any other browser, allowing you to veiw sites with pictures as you usually would. It does have one drawback however, and that is, it has a lack of navigation buttons. This does make it difficult when you’re browsing as you normally would.

Having said that, your normal browser is already open and showing you YouOS, so why not just open a new tab/window and use that?!

Now we come onto the chat application, which users of mIRC/any other IRC client will be familiar with. You have the following commands: /users – shows you all the users in the chat.
/quit – quits the chat (what a suprise!)
/join [channel] – Allows you to join a different channel, eg: “/join kangie” makes you join the channel “kangie”

FlickRSS basically is window that opens on the ‘desktop’ that shows you pictures from the popular site Flickr. (You have to specify a tag though.)

TubeRSS does what FlickRSS does, only this time it’s videos from YouTube.

YouBuddy allows you to add other users of YouOS (providing you know their name) for a bit of MSN Style chatting.

YouMail allows you to email people from within YouOS. Unfortunatly it currently only supports emailing other YouOS users, and not actual email addresses, but hopefully that will be implemented in the future.

YouShell looks like a mix between notepad and command prompt/DOS works like linux, and allows you to manage applications/processes, as well as changing the directory of files and changing the data structure. (Typing in Help gets you a nice list of all the commands and what each of them does.)

YouSticky makes a little resizable box appear on your ‘desktop’ which you can type into. Whatever you type stays there until you delete it or close the window, even if you log off. Very handy for those of you that, like me, have the memory of a goldfish!

Thats all the applications covered, so now on to how it looks. (You can sign in with a guest account on the main page and see for yourself!)

It does look pretty much like Windows, with the taskbar at the top instead of the bottom, there’s even a “Start” button, only it’s called “Stuff”.
By right-clicking the desktop, you can add shortcuts to the above applications, as well as arranging the desktop icons.
You can change the wallpaper (although if you wish to use your own, it has to be uploaded to a website first) although it does seem to change back to the default when you next log in.
There’s a taskmanager type application (the little screen on the taskbar at the right) which tells you what processes are running.
You can even (after specifying a mobile number in “My Account” in “Stuff”) text an address, and what you typed, will appear on your Notes on the desktop when you next log in.

That’s about it for now, it’s simple to use, and has potential! It does alot more that I expected it would when I first logged in, but still has a loooong way to go before it becomes any kind of competitor to Microsoft/Apple.

I must say, the biggest disadvantage is that you need an operating system in the first place to be able to use YouOS, but being able to save things without the need to use disks/CDs is deffinely very useful.

Try it here!.

Related posts:

1. Windows Live! Mail without an invite
2. Microsoft Windows Vista Build 5456 released to Beta Testers
3. Mozilla Firefox, without the mouse.
4. Writely
5. Box