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Jooce is another online desktop or Web OS you may want to investigate if you frequently spend time on the road or are forced to use a shared computer. Flash-based, Jooce is very fast and runs in a standard browser. Registration is presently free. The cartoon-look is everywhere on the website and is quite pleasing to the eye. Before commencing with a quick look at Jooce be aware that saving anything online is risky. Of course, most everyone has a GMail account, so three-quarters of our lives are already available to virtually anyone online. Once important documents are stored on a web-based OS though, the chance of compromising important data increases. Corporates may not like the idea of their employees storing sensitive information in this way. Even more important: Jooce does not utilize https for the connection to the backend. That is advantageous for speedy access but less so for overall security.

The sign-up process is speedy and uncomplicated. Enter a user name and password and an email address.

There is no verification of the email address, so the sign-up is quickly completed. Enter your credentials to log on to the personalized desktop. Jooce supports a variety of IM clients (AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo) with the exception of GTalk. The application requests details for your IM accounts and sets them up automatically. That’s it: a clean desktop with the obligatory trashcan awaits:

The icons may be moved around and a custom desktop background selected. Create new folders and upload documents. Multiple windows? No problem:

Right-click on the desktop to perform common functions. It’s all very much everything one is accustomed to on a dedicated desktop.

To work with a file, Jooce relies on local applications. In other words, the format of the file determines which application on the client system is required to open it. Provided the system one is using has the necessary applications installed, there should be no problem. Download and open with the integrated browser’s download manager and get to work.

It’s very important to remember to save the file back to Jooce. The copy one is working on is not synchronized back to Jooce automatically. Forgetting to save a local copy, editing it and then saving it back to the web OS desktop is required. Even worse than leaving sensitive documents on the web, you could now start strewing sensitive documents onto shared machines the world over! The convenience of having access to the required content is probably the most important benefit. Tools like Jooce provide alternate means for us to access our data. How we choose to use these tools is entirely up to us.

Hopefully future versions of Jooce will include better integration with Google‘s suite of applications. It would be great to have direct integration to Google Docs to edit directly online without having to rely on local storage, for example.