The Jolicloud Dashboard as it appears in my Compaq CQ60 (which proves Jolicloud isn't just for netbooks!)
It’s been nearly a year now that Jolicloud has first made its appearance in my life. It was last February that I first found out about it, when googling for netbook software. I immediately downloaded the Windows-installer to try it out (still on its beta phase).
For those who are unfamiliar with Jolicloud, you can and should check their website (here), but to make a long story short, it’s basically a Linux/Ubuntu-based operating system aimed at providing the best experience for netbook-users.
The first time I tried it out, I was instantainly surprised at how fast it was on my Eee PC 1005PE, even in a side-by-side Windows installation. The booting time alone (even with the dual-boot) was reduced to about 10 seconds and surfing the internet (including loading HD YouTube-videos) was a seamless experience.
But, to be honest, I quickly unistalled it. Don’t get me wrong: even for a beta OS, it was one of the best I’ve seen (and I’ve tested quite a lot!), but it still couldn’t replace Windows 7 Starter that was pre-installed in my Eee PC. There was still no replacing Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007. Wine (the Windows emulator for Linux) still doesn’t offer a good experience when it comes to Office 2007, so I couldn’t quite use that either.
And another aspect of Jolicloud beta was the way apps were built. It was all still too “untied”. I felt that I was always moving back and forth from one to the other in order to do what I needed…
So, I had to let it go… Until later last year, when news came out announcing the release of Jolicloud 1.0. I had to try it out!
And I did. I immediatly installed it again (using once more the dual-boot option, to keep my Windows 7, just in case) and gave it a try. Anyway, it was just the beginning of Summer, and I was going for my one-week vacations, so I had time to see how I got along with this first version.
The changes were obvious. You can see a summary-list on this blog entry (Jolicloud blog), but what I loved the most was that they had kept true to their mission – keeping it simple. And they had made it even simpler!
Adding apps (short for applications) was nothing more than clicking this “plus-sign” on the upper part of the screen and choosing from their incredibly large library of apps. All it took was 2 clicks of the mouse and Jolicloud did it all for me…
By this point, their list of apps had grown so much that you almost didn’t miss anything. Almost, because I still had the “Office 2007-issue”, which is pretty much essential in what I do…
I’m a biologist and I’m currently taking my Master’s degree in Applied Microbiology, which means I’m doing research in a lab. This also means that I use Excel and PowerPoint on a daily basis, for data-analysis, simple spreadsheets, graphs and preparing data-shows, to prepare myself for lab-meetings and seminars.
You can always argue and say “Well, you have OpenOffice for that, so why don’t you use it?! Then you can also use any Linux distro, because OpenOffice is directly compatible with those systems“. The problem is, I’ve tried OpenOffice. And I don’t like it. Yes, their “Writer” is pretty usable. What happened to their interface, though? Why are they still stuck in the beginning of the 90′s? I don’t know about you, but the OpenOffice interface kind of reminds me of Windows 3.1, which is not good… But let’s get back to the question.
Like I was saying, OpenOffice’s Writer, though hideous-looking, is good. But Calc and Impress still have a long way to go, when compared to Excel and PowerPoint… So, I stick with my “Home & Student“.
So, since I couldn’t part with those, I still didn’t stick to Jolicloud as my OS on my Eee PC. At least, not then, yet…
I have two computers: one netbook, which I take with me to the lab daily; and one laptop, which is my desktop-replacement, and I use it for gaming, watching videos and the more time and resources-consuming tasks. By October, something striked me as odd: I was only using Excel and PowerPoint in the laptop. Why was that?
I began then to realise that I wasn’t using the netbook for making presentations, because of the screen-size! It wasn’t that my Eee PC couldn’t handle the software (it actually runs PowerPoint pretty smoothly!), but the fact that it has a 10.1 inches screen doesn’t allow me to really see much in the slides. That and the fact that I spend a long time working on my presentations (I’m never satisfied), had made me choose the bigger laptop, at home, to be able to carefully and “visually” handle presentations.
At about the same time, I also received an Excel document over the e-mail and from some trick of faith I accidently clicked “visualize” which openned the document in GoogleDocs.
It wasn’t the first time I had used it but, in my mind, GoogleDocs was just an embrionic version of Office to tease Microsoft, so I didn’t even try to do anything complex. But, this time, I started editing that spreadsheet without even realizing I was using GoogleDocs and, when I did. I came to the conclusion that it did what I needed to do. And it immediatly synchronized my files, which made it possible to access them anywhere (as long as I logged in on my Google account, of course).
Right about then, Jolicloud 1.1 came out. I gave it another go. This time it didn’t took me more than two days to decide to give it a clean install and completely replace Windows 7 in my netbook.
I was already using Dropbox for more than a year then, so most of my most used files were already “on the cloud”. I was just starting to use GoogleDocs, so editing my files became even easier. GoogleCalendar I was already using for quite some time, because it allowed me to always synch my personal calendar with the lab-related calendars (though I still use a paper planner, and I probably always will).
As soon as I understood that my digital life was pretty much “on the cloud”, it was easy to just give in and making Jolicloud the synch-center for my digital life.
The way Jolicloud handles (super fast!) all my apps, the way it synchs them across platforms (you can use it in any computer with Chrome installed, as an addon), its interface (gorgeous and making the most of any screen size) and the way it simply makes my life so much easier really identify what for me is the Jolicloud experience.
What about you, are you ready to give in to cloud-computing? Have you tried Jolicloud and feel diferently? Or do you feel the same about it?
Feel free to comment!
Jolicloud 1.1 is fabulous! I have it as a dual boot option on my Asus 1000HE netbook and it works like a charm. Whenever I just have to have windows I boot to XP but I am learning that I rarely need it. And now with LibreOffice coming soon, my need for Microsoft Office will vanish completely.
Thanks for the comment, Larry!
I also barely need Windows these days. For work I just don’t need it anymore. That’s why I made a clean install in my netbook. But I’m afraid that, at home, and especially for games, I’m still Windows-dependent… But I use Windows 7 in 2.2 GHz computer, so I can’t really complain about it. It runs pretty smoothly.
As for LibreOffice, I’ve tried the 3.3 version (the non-portable one), but, to be quite honest, I found it quite heavy, at least in my netbook. I actually found it heavier than Office 2007, which I found odd… I may try the portable one, though.