In 1999 I was working at a company called WebOS that was doing a window environment and application platform that run inside the browser using techniques that nowadays people refer to as Ajax.
It seems like it is time for companies to try the same concept again. Ars Technica and ZDNet are covering YouOS (which is just years behind what people did in 1999) as well as others. However I find it quite sad that none of these articles do any research in this area and none of them seem to be aware that both WebOS and Desktop.com did this a lot better back before the dot com bubble burst.
Given that over half a decade has passed since the WebOS days you’d figure it would be superior to, or at least match, what we created back then, but evidently thats not the case. Truly sad.
WebOS was amazing for it’s time – I was dissapointed it never emerged out of beta. Browsers not up for it at the time ?
Amazingly wikipedia has a fairly informative article about WebOS.
I totally agree with you. WebOS was amazing, much before all this AJAX buzz, and some of us still remember it :-). Well, seems that we are damned to reinvent the technological wheel every few years.
Props to everyone who remembers. We had a little WebOS reunion in Sweden in early 2005. Do you think its still to early for the WebOS vision? Or is the timing better now?
Funny thing happend, I recently got a e-mail from a company who’d looked at my VDE (I complex Visual Editor for the DynAPI) and asked If I where intressed in working on dhtml flowchart application… maybe some hope for web based cool dhtml apps and not just ajax becuase it’s ajax.
If you want, you can take a look at my work and IOS and VDE over here.
Ahh WebOS, how I miss ye.
I read that ZDNet article… It made me laugh. It’s hard to believe to me that six years later the industry still hasn’t caught up. Granted, we had some of the best minds in the world working on WebOS (myself excluded… yes, I said EXcluded), but come on! Is it really that hard!?!
I’m really happy to endlessly find here, thanks to your blog, some article about WebOS. I remember to have shown WebOS in 99 to my colleagues : it was really crazy. Then these last years, i was looking for the missing WebOS, until i heard about YouOS. Once testing YouOS i said : “But many years ago, there was something like this, even better i think , and was called WebOS” Unfortunately my new colleagues don’t know WebOS….
I was stating this the other day – i saw it and went “bah, WebOS only with a new badge name” .. folks looked at me with “WebOS??”.
We have developed a system that isn’t working on the client at all, but exclusivly on the server.
The windows and it’s ui is clientside, but all the apps run on the serverside as the example app shows.
Wierdly enough, the measured serverload remains very, very low.
You seem to forget that before WebOS there was a bit called RDS and was more generic and efficient than anything done up to date.
And before RDS there was usenet, and before usenet there was BBS, and before BBS there were terminals.
There is nothing new to any work for quite a while, but there are plenty of people to take the credit for being first, working for cool companies, and generally do nothing more than scripts, whilst scripting came from environments they particurarly have an issue with. Interesting stuff.
No Google, no MS, no Sun, no Apple fan..