What I find most interesting is that both developments have a very similar aim or goal, but at the same time are very different. G.ho.st is not so ambitious as to try and become the next major web platform like Mesh, but it is trying to become the focal point of all our web interactions.

G.ho.st began as an online desktop with some uploading and synchronising capabilities while Live Mesh is a synchronisation service with some form of online desktop.

You can access the new release of G.ho.st at test.g.ho.st although be warned that it is currently even more alpha then the existing release. I actually didn’t notice any increases in instability but maybe that’s just me.

So far the changes I have noticed seem to be largely cosmetic. I requested the desktop context menu be simplified a few months ago and that seems to have happened, the start menu has also been streamlined slightly and I have noticed a few new icons scattered around the place. It could possibly be a little faster as well, but I really am not sure on that one.

I had a look around for some release notes, or a blog post from the G.ho.st developers but couldn’t seem to find one anywhere, so beyond what I’ve noticed so far I couldn’t tell you any additional changes although I’m sure there are many. I’ll keep fiddling around and see what I find.

Have any of you been using G.ho.st lately?

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Here you find additional links to upload images to Aviary, invite friends and launch the online applications that are enabled for your account. In my case only the image editor and a link to apply for an invite for the other applications. More about those later.

It’s only possible to upload one image with a maximum size of 5 Megabytes at a time and add the usual information (tags, title, description, rights) to it. It takes some time before the image is available depending on your upload speed and the load of the service. Max told me that he experienced a slow down of the system while uploading which I did not.

The usual community functions are available. Users can comment on and rate images, download the images and participate in the forums.

Phoenix the Image Editor

The image editor loads rather slowly but offers a wide variety of functions. Users can load images from their profile or from their computer. I’m not that into image editing but the functions that I would be looking for are all there. I can resize images, add text, work with layers and add several effects to it.

Someone who is using Adobe Photoshop or GIMP could definitely compare it on a professional level. It’s fine for the average user, that much I can say.

Images you work with are automatically saved and opened again when you open the image editor again.

Other applications

The list of applications, or tools how Aviary calls them, is impressive. A total of 18 tools is listed on their website including a music generator, vector editor, video editor and a desktop publishing layout generator.

Users can signup to receive initiations  for those tools once the invitations become available.

Aviary Invites

I have five Aviary invites and want to share them with you. I prefer at least one user with experience in Photoshop or another image editor who would like to write a short comparison which would be surely interesting to read. I would publish that comparison here at Ghacks.

If you want an invite reply here in the comments. Please add if you have experience with another image editor and would like to write that short comparison. Thanks again Max for the invite, it was really nice to think of me.

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After creating a free account at myGOYA and signing in using the https protocol you can see an overview of your virtual system drawing up how many messages / e-mails / contacts / calendar records you got and free space available on the web hard drive. MyGOYA provides 512 MB free space for e-mails and the same amount for all other data again. Should be quite sufficient for a light-weight and portable operating system.

After firing up the virtual system, which takes just few seconds, you can do many things that you’d be able to do on your own system like storing files, managing e-mails and contacts using built-in client, chatting with other users, planning events with a calendar, playing media files, scheduling tasks and so forth.

The system is also connected with other Magix’s free services like photo album, website/blog maker etc, creating a huge complex of services and tools that you can use along with the virtual desktop itself. Widget support with 4 widgets at present could become more relevant if there are more of them in the future.

The last feature I wouldn’t like to forget is related to the “tab mania”. Rather then being solid and permanent, each desktop is in fact a tab that you can close whenever you like or create a new tab – desktop whenever you need.

Another web-based desktop environment fills in the collection of services of this kind. Using the solution from Magix is fast and simple and it might get pretty popular when all minor bugs (usually German / English translation) are fixed.

There aren’t really a lot of information about the requirements but I was able to access myGOYA with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera.

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