The future is here. It’s not evenly distributed yet.
William Gibson
Two years ago, we had a crazy idea, reinvent our relationship with computers. The PC revolution is more than 30 years old, and we thought that computers turned into a “screen bureaucracy” that steps between you and the Internet. We started asking ourselves, how can we reinvent the idea of an operating system and ended up asking, do we really need an operating system?
The reason we created Jolicloud is simple: create a useful and smart desktop that knows when to get out of the way. Making things simple doesn’t mean reducing the possibilities, it means focusing on what matters. We thought that if Jolicloud could improve the productivity of anyone on a computer by 5%, it could be a game changer.
The new trend around tablets and phones is to provide beautiful and simpler interfaces, but they are closed and reduce the scope of what you can do. Jolicloud brings this type of interface to “the other half”, people who don’t have the chance to buy these new tools and have to fight with outdated software.
With what we are releasing today, Jolicloud will bring all its users one step ahead of what Google, Apple and Microsoft are announcing. When everybody talks about HTML5 as the future, we deliver it today, now and for everyone. But here is the trick, you should not be forced to buy an expensive device to benefit from these technologies. With Jolicloud, you just need to recycle any computer.
We are on a mission to make quality computing affordable in the world and we are not accepting to play by the traditional rules that made change unavailable for years.
Today, we are stepping away from “the netbook only OS”. There are about 100 to 300 million computers waiting right now for Jolicloud to reveal their full potential. We hope that you will help bring as many people as possible to Jolicloud and donate computers you don’t need anymore to schools, kids or people that could benefit from using a better interface to the web. Getting everyone online is too important to let those hundreds of millions of computers remain abandoned. The new focus of the OS is about recycling computers.
Users upgrading from Jolicloud 1.0 will enjoy performance improvements and better battery life. You can check our previous posts for the list of improvements and more details about the OS changes.
We also hope that you will enjoy the brand new HTML5 desktop that anyone on Chrome can use online at my.jolicloud.com. We have listened to your feedback and added some of the most requested features, more of them are coming soon. Here are the highlights of what’s new:
- Dashboard customization with beautiful background images
- Simplified access to the computer settings
- Ability to add any local app to your desktop from a Jolicloud device
- Faster sign up and login using Facebook Connect
- Improved user interface design
With Jolicloud 1.1, we have worked hard to make the best release ever and have partnered with 18 new mirrors, commercial and universities. It will be available on these mirrors and also on BitTorrent. If you are using BitTorrent, we would appreciate if you can seed as long as you can to make the download as fast as possible.
If you are running Jolicloud 1.0, we will start updating users in a few days, but if you can’t wait to try it, the new ISO and Windows installer will be available for download later today. Update: the Jolicloud 1.1 ISO and Windows Installer are now ready for download, and the upgrade from Jolicloud 1.0 to 1.1 is also available!
There are a few exciting days ahead. We are very happy with Jolicloud 1.1 and we want to share the excitement with our users. Thanks for your support, you are awesome.
Happy Joliclouding!
2:04 pm
Thank you for this release!