Psych Desktop soon to become more Lucid

We heard from Will of the Psych Desktop project as he ran across our coverage of other Web desktop apps. He shared with us his project that is part of the Dojo Foundation which you can check out here.

He had some good thoughts, so I thought I would pass them along below:

Psych Desktop is an open source web desktop licensed under the AFL. We're a part of the Dojo Foundation, and have been around for around two years I believe. We're going to rename the project as Lucid when we finish our new site.

Anyways, there are two main ideas behind Lucid. The first is that we aren't just building a clone of a desktop environment, but rather a desktop that was built for the web. For example, in 1.1 we plan on providing an alternate UI made for mobile devices such as an iPhone. Another example of what we want to accomplish would be a photo manager that would easily allow you to publish photos to a public photo gallery. We also want to do the typical things, like a word processor and email, but that's not the main idea behind the desktop.

The second idea behind it is that we should provide a nice, clean set of APIs for developers to use in their apps. For example, we've got a Registry that is based off of a dojo.data store, so you can plug it directly into a dojox.grid.DataGrid, and you instantly have an editable grid that writes back to the store. Another neat API is the crosstalk API, which allows intercommunication between users. The Messenger app is using this. There's also a sound API that can be used to playback audio. The apps are written in javascript, and don't require any server-side code at all. And of course, there's also a filesystem.

Right now we're in beta, but we're coming close to our 1.0 release. There's still a bit of work to be done, but it's stable enough for developers to start playing with it. 1.1 is going to be a lot more innovative, but I think 1.0 will be good starting grounds for our expedition.

It is cool to see the Will is passionate about the area and is "in it for the long term."