Thread: G.ho.st

A joint project between Israeli and Palestinian programmers, G.ho.st is based on Amazon's S3 Web services and recently moved out of its alpha phase into public beta. G.ho.st claims to be the world's only true Web OS, since the service says.it can work openly and seamlessly with leading third-party Web applications such as Google Docs and Zoho. G.ho.st has a lot of promise and some very functional tools, but it's not quite as polished as I'd hoped, and the experience was a little inconsistent and buggy.

When you click on a desktop item, for example, it tends to stay highlighted until you click on it again. That can become distracting and hard to look at, once all your desktop items are highlighted. At one point I also had an annoying problem with G.ho.st's keyboard shortcuts. The feature malfunctioned, making it impossible to hit letters like 'n' or 's' without causing G.ho.st to carry out a process like saving a file or refreshing the Web page. Needless to say, this made G.ho.st impossible to use; however, over the several days that I tried out G.ho.st, that malfunction happened only once, and I was able to fix it with a browser refresh.

On the plus side, G.ho.st comes with all kinds of goodies, including 15GB of free storage; support for 24 different default languages; a good file-sync manager; a mobile phone Web app; your own G.ho.st-branded e-mail with POP support; an MP3 player; an integrated Flickr search tool; an instant messenging app with support for AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, and MSN protocols; quick-launch access to a variety of Web search and info sites including Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia; and a wide library of applications you can use to customize your G.ho.st desktop.

G.ho.st also has the best inenvironment Web browser of all the services I tried out. It will save your cookies and browsing history so you can access them anywhere.

G.ho.st uses the Zoho online office suite for its default productivity applications, and the programs can be viewed within the environment. You can also save and access files from your Google Docs account, and can even send a document directly to Microsoft Office applications on your desktop. The only downside to G.ho.st's office suite is that it does not have a PDF reader.

Pros: Offers a whopping 15GB of free storage; wide support for various productivity file formats; a good e-mail tool that allows you to create appointments from e-mails; fea-tures a dragand-drop appointment maker; a tabbed browser and MP3 player.

Cons: No support for the PDF format. If you are going to use G.ho.st, be prepared for the occasional ,flaw, but know that 1TIost problems can be fixed with a browser refresh.

Tip: G.ho.st's home page is in Hebrew by default. In the address bar, just switch "he" for Hebrew at the end of the URL to "en" for English so you can navigate the site more easily.