Today I’ve had the pleasure of trying out the very early version of YouOS. The premise is that, with YouOS, you have a browser-based desktop operating system with various applications available and the tools to build applications of your own.

When logged in, you have a taskbar at the top of the window in which there is a button labelled ‘Stuff’. This button is like the ‘Start’ button in Windows and gives you access to a list of applications and functions. The applications, when active run in a draggable, resizable window. Each application also shows as a tab in the taskbar so that you can see what apps are running even if they are minimised.

At this early stage, the applications available are pretty simple but the potential here is quite amazing when you see that one of the default applications utilises the Flickr API and then think about how many great APIs ar available for developers use at the moment. I’m currently using the Rich TextEditor app to compose this Blog Entry, it’s not groundbreaking stuff but it’s perfectly functional and the fact that I could save where I’m up to, logout and then go round to a friend’s house, login from his PC and carry on from where I left off is brilliant.

This seems like a sound idea to me, I regularly move from one PC to another and a persistent workspace would be ideal for those things with which I fill spare moments (or use as displacement activity when I should be working on something else). I currently rely on the likes of del.icio.us or Backpack to keep track of those thing which I jump in and out of such as articles that I might be reading or software ideas that I’m sketching out to see if they’re worth following up.