11 August 2013

Unlockable Gateway

I've been a proud Linux user for several years. I started with Ubuntu, but never quite liked how it worked, dabbled in a few others I can't recall names to, and then finally settled on Linux Mint as my favorite, namely for their Long Term Support versions. At the time of this writing, I've yet to try Peppermint, a fork of Mint, though it looks very promising. My second favorite is Jolicloud (or JoliOS, or Jolidrive... they've got a bit of an identity issue they need to work out once and for all). I'd written a review of an early version of their OS, and while I didn't exactly have the nicest things to say, they've gotten much better, and the staff I spoke to while writing my little expose were surprisingly good sports about what I said about their early efforts. Despite that bit of drama, it is actually the flavor of Linux I will always recommend to anyone curious about using Linux that's not quite ready to commit to a full install (or even a partition) of something more robust. 
The Jolicrew is a strange lot with a downright baffling mission statement. Their OS is meant to mimic a tablet's interface, specifically iOS, but is not actually meant to be run on a tablet. Instead, one of their biggest selling points was "breathing life into an old desktop" which sounds a bit silly, but when you consider the elderly or even very young children, the idea of doing away with that tired old desktop interface in favor of app tiles does sound very appealing. In addition to these fairly low system requirements, the system has, hands down, the most painless trial and/or installation process I've ever seen. I wish more Linux flavors took after these methods to make their systems more accessible to weary consumers. Normally, if you want to try out a Linux OS, you've got to go into the boot menu of your startup screen... and it's possible I've lost at least half of you already. I'm not saying you're stupid or anything like that, but you'd never have to do anything like this for a game or a browser, so why should the OS be any different. JoliOS not only can be run effectively as an application (no different than a word processor or a game) that can be un/installed with the greatest of ease, but it can even be run in a browser
While I've gone back to using Windows (7, in case you're wondering), and my old desktop running Mint is gathering dust, Jolicloud never left my side, so to speak. It's a kind of OS backup. Even if I'm using someone else's computer, I can log in to Jolicloud and access most of my services through there. I still check in on it every once in a while so I don't get surprised by any major changes or upheavals to the interface or the service connections. 
Today was when I checked in on it and was surprised, then baffled, by a change to the service connections, specifically Evernote. There was a "new" flag over the "add new services" bar at the side, which I clicked on. Most of the apps were ones I'd never heard of, the rest I had no real use for, and then I saw Evernote was there with a padlock icon over it. I clicked on it and got the above screenshot. In order to use the app and have it work with my Jolidrive page, I essentially had to pimp Jolicloud on one of my social networks. 

I'm really not sure what to think about this, and not simply because I already have Evernote on my JoliOS dashboard. 

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