Meditations on AJAX Desktops
I’m reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and it is a good book. When I compare the honesty, clarity and wisdom of the emperor’s words to the senseless verbiage of modern philosophy - postmodernism in particular, I get all sentimental and mellow and put on some Coldplay.
Ahem.
It seems that the number of AJAX based desktops, all chasing VCs (yes, you Yahoo/Google) like there is no tomorrow, just keeps on growing.
My quicky evaluation: goowy has a nice interface - lots of eyecandy (all Flash) and very Macish. Fold looks more pedestrian - I only have the screenshots to go by as they are in private beta. Protopage is not a bad implementation. Neither is pageflakes - more googlish in style. Also gave Gtalkr a look. Flash-based but they could exploit it much more. Gtalkr don’t aim to take over your desktop, yet. They just repackage gmail, youtube, flickr, blogs, etc. No calendar or sticky notes so far.
Based on what I’ve seen the most impressive so far is… MacOSX ; ) Well, goowy, which is is my favourite, was inspired by it. Might as well go back to my lovely Mac.
Dear reader, before you leave I must warn you of something. I’ve heard that there is another AJAX-based desktop coming.
And its like something you’ve completely seen before …