The most popular trend of the recent years has been the development and popularization of online applications. Web applications, which were first developed as an experiment, now has become so popular that they successfully compete with desktop apps. That’s why it may be easily supposed that very soon we won’t need an operating system in the form we see and use it now. Thus, Google has already been selling Chromebooks, where Chrome browser is used instead of a regular operating system. But if you still can’t imagine your digital life without an operating system, you can take it to the cloud storage. Such opportunity is provided by the service ZeroPC.
ZeroPC is an online service which is intended for integrating the functions of different web applications in one convenient framework. In other words, it’s a real online operating system, where Internet services are used as programs, and cloud storages are used as hard drives.
In order to start using this service you need to create a new account or login with your Google, Facebook or Twitter account. After that you’ll get into a usual Windows-like environment where you see desktop with shortcuts and folders, Recycle bin, even usual Menu button – everything is in its place. Now you need to connect to all your accounts in different network services. To do that, launch Accounts Manager. As for now, ZeroPC can work with Facebook, Twitter, Google, Box.net, Dropbox, Evernote, Flickr, Instagram, Picasa, SkyDrive, SugarSync. The list is pretty impressive, and the developers say they’re going to enlarge it.
Total disk space of all connected services makes a ZeroPC’s hard drive, where all data from different cloud storages are sorted into different folders. If you launch a file manager you’ll be able to manage these files the same way you do with the help of an Explorer on your desktop, that is to move, rename, delete files, etc.
ZeroPC.com #MA7 Ninja Challenge (Photo credit: kawanet)
You may use different types of files with the help of built-in utilities. For example, if you need to look through the pictures, there’s a Picture Viewer for that purpose, and for listening to music and watching video there’re Audio and Video players. For working with documents, texts and PDF files Google Docs is used. And it’s also worth mentioning that as in a regular operating system you can work with several files simultaneously regardless of the storage these files re kept in. For example, I opened a file from Google Docs, a picture from Dropbox and while I was opening them I listened to the music from my SugarSync account.
Apart from the functions of managing and editing files, ZeroPC has great tools for searching for files that are kept in your cloud accounts and for analyzing free space left in your accounts. For file search you may use special field in the task bar or in the file manager. If you want to see the situation with all you cloud storage accounts you may use special program called Cloud Dashboard. It will tell you how much free space is left in your accounts together and in each one separately and also will provide you with the information about the amount of data kept.
Also, ZeroPC has its own messenger for message exchange in popular social networks, really simple text editor, a mail client and even a web browser. It’s fun to launch a virtual browser within the real one, but nevertheless, it works really fast, has a multitab interface and performs well.
The functions I described here are not the only ones. You may get to know other functions by using ZeroPC by yourselves. Personally I can say that this project seems to be really interesting and perspective for me and I’m going to track its development.
About Guest Author: Eugene Rudenko is a tech writer for IT company Intellectsoft (visit company’s site). The company specializes in Android, iOS, Blackberry and WP development.
