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Jolicloud 1.0 Has an HTML5 UI 99

kai_hiwatari writes "Jolicloud 1.0, a Linux based OS for netbooks, was launched a few days back. In this new release, the developers have completely replaced the old interface based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix in favor of a new one based on HTML5. Jolicloud 1.0 also features a new syncing feature using which you can sync installed applications across all your systems running on Jolicloud. Other interesting features includes new app center, social stream, etc."
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Jolicloud 1.0 Has an HTML5 UI

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  • by suso ( 153703 ) *

    Why does it have cloud in its name? Just to attract attention or is there some related feature?

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Chelmet ( 1273754 )
      Somebody clearly hasn't RTFA
      • by suso ( 153703 ) *

        I skimmed it. But I was more drawing attention to overuse of the cloud term.

        • I was going to paste the content, since it seems to be /.ed. Then I realized it was just a string of buzzwords.
        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) *

          But I was more drawing attention to overuse of the cloud term.

          "Jolicloud" is not a good high-tech name.

          It makes me think of the scene in an old B-movie (Flashdance) where a very creepy and perverted character coos "It's tres jolie, Coco! Tres jolie!" to a young woman he hires for what she thinks is a photo shoot but is really an excuse for him to masturbate.

          Well, maybe it's not such a bad name for a Linux distro, after all.

          • Re:Cloud? (Score:5, Informative)

            by dangitman ( 862676 ) on Saturday July 17, 2010 @10:00PM (#32940476)

            It makes me think of the scene in an old B-movie (Flashdance)

            You don't seem to understand what a B-movie is. Flashdance is certainly not one. In fact, Flashdance was released in an era when the B-movie was basically extinct.

            A B-movie is a formulaic low-budget film that is intended to accompany the A-movie in a double-feature screening. Flashdance was not low budget, and was not intended to be seen as part of a double-feature screening. In fact, it was a huge box-office success.

            • Not to drift off topic, but B-movies never died, they just became "Direct-To-Video" in the '80s....
              • Re:Cloud? (Score:5, Informative)

                by dangitman ( 862676 ) on Saturday July 17, 2010 @11:10PM (#32940720)

                Not to drift off topic, but B-movies never died, they just became "Direct-To-Video" in the '80s....

                No to belabor the point, but I think that is a fairly different realm. The B-movie is a relic of an era when people didn't have TVs, and would go to the cinema for a whole evening's entertainment. And they would go regularly. There would be newsreels and short films in addition to the feature films. The B-movie exists in this context, where it is a companion to other films.

                The direct-to-video low budget movie is a different phenomenon, that caters to individual viewers in their homes. They are not intended to complement other films, and they are often very niche in their targeted audience.

                I think we need to draw this distinction, because what is happening now (YouTube, etc) is very different to the B-movie phenomenon. B-movies were made industrially, as a part of the studio system. Much like tins of processed food. The direct-to-video and Youtube phenomenon are more about smaller (and individual) producers doing their own thing, not something that's made-to-spec by the studios to act as filler.

                • food. The direct-to-video and Youtube phenomenon are more about smaller (and individual) producers doing their own thing, not something that's made-to-spec by the studios to act as filler.

                  Youtube, maybe. Lots of "direct-to-video" is made-to-spec formulaic sequels produced by the studio system; its different from classic B-movie as its not intended to complement a "bigger" movie in the same way (though, quite often, they do ride on the coattails of a bigger movie in a different way, as they are often sequels

            • You don't seem to understand what a B-movie is

              No GP understands what a B-movie is, you just define what a B-movie used to be.

              We use "B-movie" ironically nowadays, to suggest that a big blockbuster film is as worthless as the cheap and cheerful B-movies of old.

          • The name reminds me of Jollibee, a Filipino fast-food chain that has fried chicken and random weird stuff. (There's one next to Moscone Center in San Francisco.)

      • by aliquis ( 678370 )

        I tried to but it seems down ...

        Who could had guessed?

    • Re:Cloud? (Score:5, Funny)

      by the_womble ( 580291 ) on Sunday July 18, 2010 @08:53AM (#32942136) Homepage Journal

      Having cloud in the name synergisticaly enhances perceived brand value.

  • having tried... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mewshi_nya ( 1394329 ) on Saturday July 17, 2010 @08:33PM (#32940156)

    having tried jolicloud beta, I wholeheartedly look forward to the finished product. The UNR-based GUI was nice, but if i wanted UNR, I'd freakin' run UNR on it.

    • having tried jolicloud beta, I wholeheartedly look forward to the finished product. The UNR-based GUI was nice, but if i wanted UNR, I'd freakin' run UNR on it.

      Not if you had an EEE 701 at 600MHz. Jolicloud includes the hack to overclock your 701 to 900MHz like the later-model units which had zero hardware changes from the early ones (except sometimes coming with a different SSD AFAIK?)

      I, too, am seriously annoyed about this rolling release nonsense. What's really sad is that when they added the 1.0 teaser to the update app, it was too wide so it created a scrollbar. So now not only do I see a teaser for an OS I can't download, but it mars the appearance of the up

  • by Spazntwich ( 208070 ) on Saturday July 17, 2010 @08:49PM (#32940210)

    Cloud html5 app syncing is great, but I'm curious if they've got 4g back compatible web 3.0 blueface interballs technology for the kind of futureproof idevice demands the superuser of yestermorrow is sure to be told he needs.

    Now the kicker, does it run beowulf? Last time I tried to stync my grendel module .99x was torn to pieces before the crowdsourced beta swarm could move to India.

    • Cloud html5 app syncing

      They call it syncing but isn't it just centralisation?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by yelvington ( 8169 )

        Cloud html5 app syncing

        They call it syncing but isn't it just centralisation?

        Perhaps you were asking a serious question -- and the answer is: No, it isn't JUST centralization.

        Syncing isn't just between a device and cloud storage. It can accommodate multiple devices of multiple types, and "current state" information, not just files.

        Fully implemented, you should be able to stop reading a book on your tablet, open it on your phone, and automatically pick up the same paragraph. Or stop writing midsentence, go home, and continue.

        Data can be backed up into cloud storage but reside whereve

        • Things to not worry about include blowing a hard disk

          I like to think of myself as fairly sexually sophisticated, but I have to say this is a new one on me.

    • by noidentity ( 188756 ) on Saturday July 17, 2010 @09:24PM (#32940356)
      Meh, when they make the whole UI in Adobe Flash, it will be truely synergistically interfaced.
    • by AnttiV ( 1805624 ) on Saturday July 17, 2010 @09:32PM (#32940386)
      I'd also have a blue face, if my balls were suddenly internal...
      1. Made my freakin' day
      2. "Yestermorrow" is the new best word ever

      Thank you, good sir/madam.

    • I Googled for the "next big thing" and this post was the number 1 hit. I'm still not sure what it is though.

  • by Aladrin ( 926209 ) on Saturday July 17, 2010 @09:22PM (#32940350)

    You can't really call it 'launched' when only select people have it. You can't DL it yet (it's still the pre-release available for DL) and if you already have it, you have to wait for them to allow you to upgrade.

    It's not launched. It's in preview.

    • Airbus or Boeing launch a new plane, and no one has one until several years later. I have no issues with the usage of the term here.
  • Jolicloud.

    Tell me why the geek's mind turn to mush when it comes to marketing his projects.

    Is it "all the sugar and twice the caffeine" in his Jolt Cola?

  • HTML 5 Apps (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Toonol ( 1057698 ) on Saturday July 17, 2010 @09:31PM (#32940384)
    I worry that this will be like Java apps; a way to make UIs and performance even worse. HTML is great, and HTML 5 is a clear improvement; but it certainly is nowhere near the performance, stability, and ease of use of an application designed a little closer to the hardware.

    I've seen many decent programs ruined as companies tossed the client software they had written in C++ or even VB, and move to web-based UIs. Programming things in HTML 5 that would be best written in any of a dozen other languages will just stigmatize HTML 5, kind of the way you get a sinking feeling in your stomach when you fire up a new program and realize, while it's churning, that it's written in Java.
    • Re:HTML 5 Apps (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Saturday July 17, 2010 @10:44PM (#32940622) Journal

      it certainly is nowhere near the performance, stability, and ease of use of an application designed a little closer to the hardware.

      That depends what you're looking for. There are certain things I use Web applications for that I don't want anywhere near my hardware, or even my OS -- HTML makes a nice sandbox.

      In that sense -- in the sense of, hey, here's a cool toy I want to try out for a few minutes (which covers 99% of the apps in any of these newfangled "app stores") -- HTML actually wins for all of these. With a decent browser, performance comes close enough, and the speed with which the application is "installed" is unmatched. Similarly, it's much easier to just try it out for a few seconds and come back later -- and since it's sandboxed for me, it makes my machine much more stable than if I'd been using native equivalents.

      Even where native apps win, they are losing ground.

      Stability? That's a joke -- when was the last time a website segfaulted? Then again, native apps work without an Internet connection -- but HTML5 lets web apps do that, too.

      Ease of use? Everyone knows how to use a website, and websites provide things like tabs, bookmarks, history, keyboard shortcuts, extensions, even user scripts. Often, apps have a requirement for functionality like this, and they end up rebuilding something a browser is already very good at -- for example, JDeveloper's online documentation seems to emulate a web browser full of tabs, with back and forward buttons, hyperlinks, etc, but I can't open a new link in a new tab at all, and I can't use keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs, close tabs, or go back/forward. I certainly can't bookmark things.

      These are all solved problems on the Web, and what's more, by using a standard Web interface, you no longer have to get this right yourself -- if a user doesn't like how tabs work in your "application", they can simply download a new browser.

      Performance? You gave Java as an example -- I have few complaints about the performance of Java itself. The main places Java loses are boot time (waiting for a JVM to fire up) and poorly-written apps. I've been forced to develop Java in school and now for an internship, using Eclipse and JDeveloper, and the difference between the performance of those IDEs, as applications, is like night and day -- Eclipse launches quickly and I've never had it lag or crash, while JDeveloper takes forever to start, the UI lags constantly, and after extended use, it almost inevitably grinds to a halt or outright crashes.

      Similarly, Chrome, Konqueror, and Firefox seem to all be written in C/C++, and of these, Chrome launches faster than Konqueror, and every single website I visit seems faster in Chrome than in Konqueror, even though both have common roots in KHTML/WebKit -- even though Konqueror uses Qt, which is already loaded all over my system, and Chrome uses gtk.

      The difference isn't the language, it's the developer.

      I've seen many decent programs ruined as companies tossed the client software they had written in C++ or even VB, and move to web-based UIs.

      There are many possible reasons for this. Probably the top two are throwing away their existing codebase (and thus, their competitive advantage), and trying to take something fundamentally non-Web and push it into the Web, instead of trying to re-think the application from the ground up as a web application.

      It could also be that you had a kneejerk reaction to an otherwise decent interface. It could even be that your browser sucks. Which applications are we talking about?

      But of course...

      Programming things in HTML 5 that would be best written in any of a dozen other languages will just stigmatize HTML 5...

      Maybe at first, the way VB, PHP, and Ruby are all stigmatized because there are so many novice programmers flocking to them. Java, perhaps even more so, as universities seem to have largely embraced either Java o

      • when was the last time a website segfaulted?

        Let me check my logs.

        • The webserver segfaulting is a different issue, but every bit as avoidable by, again, pulling back from the hardware just a bit.

      • Re:HTML 5 Apps (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Nursie ( 632944 ) on Sunday July 18, 2010 @01:54AM (#32941170)

        It doesn't matter too much to me whether it's java that's slow or if it's that 90% of java developers suck. The end result is the same, a lot of people will deliberately avoid using it. Hell, if 90% of java developers suck badly enough to make slow, bad programs then perhaps that's a flaw in the JVM/Java too.

        Probably not though, it's likely more reflective of Java being the default language these days.

        Oh, and FYI, websites cause browsers to fault relatively frequently, unfortunately, because you can't avoid having native code *somewhere*, and browsers are not written perfectly.

        • It doesn't matter too much to me whether it's java that's slow or if it's that 90% of java developers suck. The end result is the same, a lot of people will deliberately avoid using it.

          Not necessarily -- again, do people notice or care what language an app is written in when it works? I deliberately avoid PHP, and I've been accused of avoiding it because stupid people develop in it. People also rip on Rails all the time -- "Rails can't scale" is the phrase.

          But people use Twitter and Facebook, and no one cares what those are written in.

          Oh, and FYI, websites cause browsers to fault relatively frequently, unfortunately, because you can't avoid having native code *somewhere*, and browsers are not written perfectly.

          While true, how frequently is "frequently"? And how much is the damage?

          It's been at least six months, maybe a year, since I've seen anything crash all of Ch

          • by Nursie ( 632944 )

            Well, you can cut out as much native code as you like if you have a dislike for it.

            Me, I'm a C programmer and I write performance-critical server code. It doesn't crash all that often because myself and my team are competent.

            We see other teams doing things in java that take massive amounts of memory and processor to get near what we can do on pretty standard hardware and ... well ... there are advantages to coding natively.

            (But I'll don't really understand how python can start in a heartbeat when java takes

            • Me, I'm a C programmer and I write performance-critical server code. It doesn't crash all that often because myself and my team are competent.

              I'll take your word for that. And yet...

              We see other teams doing things in java that take massive amounts of memory and processor to get near what we can do on pretty standard hardware

              Were those competent teams?

              And these aren't the only things to look at. I don't think Java is that much of a penalty anymore -- in some cases, it's even faster -- but I'm also a Ruby developer. I care about my code being fast, but only to a point -- if my code is slower than yours by a constant factor of 100, say, well, hardware is a lot cheaper than developers. If my code is exponentially slower than yours, that's not the language, that's my fault.

              there are advantages to coding natively.

              What are they, on t

              • by Nursie ( 632944 )

                On the server side you have the advantages of speed and control.

                When you're already working on pretty big iron and you're trying to squeeze a few more percent out of it, it seems to be the way to go. Or in my experience it is.

                I think the attitude that hardware is cheap (which is indeed true) has turned out a lot of java programmers that just don't think about speed and efficiency. Even the ones who are otherwise competent. Though some of the ones I encounter are finally getting better at stopping memory lea

      • Bravo (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        One of the smartest comments on this topic i have seen for a while now.

        I've seen some awesome applications written in Java, Flash, and HTML5.

        You can't blame a language for awful applications written in them, it is the awful developers who throw around hacks, broken and messy, completely unoptimized code who are to blame.
        And they aren't the only ones to blame either, STANDARDS are to blame as well. Some standards are pretentiously over-complex for the sake of readability, or "super cool new coding" standard

        • You can't blame a language for awful applications written in them, it is the awful developers who throw around hacks, broken and messy, completely unoptimized code who are to blame.

          I should've thrown in a caveat...

          You can blame a language for shortcomings in the language. As an example, maybe it's been resolved recently (though I doubt it), but when every single flash video player, including YouTube, brings my system to its knees trying to play 1080p h.264, but the same video plays flawlessly in mplayer or VLC -- or when a small video takes 50% CPU for Flash to play, and 0.2% CPU for mplayer or VLC -- that's definitely an issue with Flash.

          It's possible that everyone is doing it wrong

      • With a decent browser, performance comes close enough, and the speed with which the application is "installed" is unmatched

        I'd quite like to have one of those.
        What are those magic browsers you speak of?

        On Linux, all of them are slow (except maybe Opera).

        • I use Chrome. Firefox isn't bad either.

          • Firefox is extremely sluggish for me.
            Just tried Chrome. I thought it was unstable on Linux, but it's pretty good and lightning fast. Don't really like the interface and the lack of settings though.

            • Personally, I got used to the settings pretty quickly. I really take back every bad thing I said about its development after its first windows only release. This is one of the few programs whose cross-platform state really does seem to have taken a while in large part because they were working hard to not only get it working in linux, but working right.
  • Based on the video, it looks like it has potential. But there are many things that are just a poor user interface. An example would be the speed that it takes to start up. GIMP just looks out of place. Note that I am comparing this to an iPad – and for good reason – this resembles the same target market to me.
  • This is why ChromeOS is gonna be so rocks and rule the world. HTML5 is clearly blurring the distinction between a web app and a desktop application, and you can see that it is definitely possible to do almost everything with just a browser using HTML5 and javascript.

    There is this trend of replacing traditional GUI interface with web interface, even though the application itself is a desktop application. Such examples are Freenet, Transmission, Yacy, and so on. Some other applications are using web interface

    • by icebraining ( 1313345 ) on Sunday July 18, 2010 @09:54AM (#32942406) Homepage

      Why is a web interface better?

      They're *not* richer, nor they can possibly be: all the web interfaces are drawn by desktop apps, called browsers! Any restriction that affect desktop GUIs also invariably affect web GUIs.

      The opposite happens: slim, fast desktop GUIs have to be transformed into a mess of HTML+CSS+JS which are much less efficient. Nothing is faster than a simple ncurses GUI, which is more than enough for most of my apps (IM, email, network manager, text editor, etc).

      I prefer normal servers, allowing me to use a nice, slim desktop app in my computer, and a web GUI on other PCs. Like email: IMAP for most uses, webmail for the occasional external access.

      • A WELL WRITTEN desktop app interface can be good. However it is MUCH easier to write a good web interface. Why? Its really easy to scale, size, change, async, and just about do anything. The web interface already has a framework that is easy to use and code for AND works on EVERY OS.

  • Anyone else think it said lolicloud?

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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