Hello Desktop (again)
Most of you have probably never heard about Desktop.
It was never really intended to become a public product. After Jolicloud, my former company, I started looking for a service to manage all my digital belongings uploaded in different incompatible storages: archives of my previous computers, documents, music, multimedia content and photos.
But there was nothing on the market so I decided to launch Desktop as a side project to manage my own content.
Create a home for our digital belongings
Desktop started as a small but incredibly useful product. It is a media center, a content aggregator, and a powerful internet file manager all in one, always accessible online.
But it became much more.
Desktop can connect to multiple services and manage multiple accounts. With just one login it gives you access to all your content, perfectly organized, without having to open a dozen different tabs in your browser.
The interface is the same for every service, with all the features you would expect from a modern filesystem. It makes our daily use of cloud storage extremely simple and useful.
With a feature called Cloud to Cloud, we made it possible to copy content from one service to another, using the most appropriate format. This allowed us to reorganize our cloud content where it needs to be.
Because so much of our “pre-cloud” content is now online, we designed web players to play music or videos. Desktop opens your photos directly inside your browser, without the need for external plugins or opening them in an other services.
What began as a nice prototype has turned into a necessary product.
Eventually, we started making our service available to a few external users to get their feedback. To cover the cost of bandwidth, we introduced a yearly subscription of 50 euros to unlock certain features. A few hundred members turned into a few thousand, and Desktop started to gain some traction.
Welcome to Desktop (rebooted)
Before bringing Desktop to a larger audience, we knew that we had to improve the performance. Instead of releasing the product, we made the decision to completely rewrite our prototype from the ground up using some of the most advanced technology on the web: React, GraphQL and Apollo. This update took an entire year and was completely off the radar.
The version you will experience today is the result of this complete overhaul. It’s ten times faster than the previous version of Desktop. We call it Desktop Rebooted.
Our web players have also been updated to use the most advanced components.
Our video player, for example, video.js is the same one used in PopcornTime, but we improved it by automatically displaying movie information and managing subtitles with subtlety.
We render our PDF documents with pdf.js. For our music experience, we have integrated the aurora library to add FLAC, AAC, and Ogg Vorbis capabilities to our music player, high definition audio in your browser.
Because we love ebooks, we integrated the best ePub reader available on the market to make books easily readable with a clean design to render them. We also use that design to show you your saved articles.
In addition to theses players, we’ve added a text editor that supports Markdown, code, and HTML, an office document editor (experimental at this stage) and a photo editor.
We also tripled the number of modules available on Desktop. We started with Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Box. As of today, we have 16 modules available including private cloud storage like Amazon S3, OwnCloud, Nextcloud, and WebDAV support. You also have unified access to your content stored on independent services like Pocket (saved articles) or SmugMug (photos).
Of course, all the content available on Desktop is searchable. You can also pin folders in your Sidebar and we’ll let you know when one of them has been updated since your last visit. We have a Favorites section to regroup all the important files you need in one place, no matter where they are from.
Desktop is the perfect everyday companion to access your personal and professional cloud.
We are already working on the next set of features and mobile access, but we need your support.
This important mission needs your support.
The ultimate goal of Desktop is to make our users completely independent from the closed platforms that host their data.
Not everyone understands how important this is. But for those of you who want to remain in control of your digital life, Desktop is the first step. Becoming a member will put you a step ahead.
Maintaining a quality service has a cost. Unlike other services that charge a lot, we’ve made our subscriptions very reasonable.
But we have good news.
If you are a former member of Jolicloud, you can take advantage of our “friends and family” plan that gives you free access to some parts of the product. But you should consider becoming a member.
Desktop is the first product from the Dissident platform.
Desktop is just the first of the three services we are launching this year with Dissident, our Slow Web Studio.
Members can also preview Dashboard, a reimagined way to navigate social media, and Library, our free educational and cultural platform. More on that soon.
We can’t wait to have you try Desktop and get your feedback.
We know you’ll have a great time with Desktop.
Enjoy.
