Show HN: horbito – The new Cloud | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: horbito – The new Cloud

horbito.com

25 pointsopenmaze21 comments

Web desktops are back again! It seems it's been a long time since I last saw one. This topic always generates a big debate whether a cloud os is the future or not. In my opinion, the idea of running a universally accepted "computer" accessible from anywhere and any device is actually really powerful and centralizing all our internet lifes in one place so we can control our data is huge.

EDIT: I've been playing around with horbito for a while and it's pretty badass, it works quite fast and integrates really well with Microsoft Office, kudos for the team

Great point, I'm checking out office now... I use to be a heavy excel user, but ever since arch, I've been stuck on gsheets

if this could run excel smoothly, it would be pretty amazing, I've been trying to find a solution but yet to find a good seamless one. Wine/virtualbox are both mediocre solutions atm.

Thank you very much!! We also think web desktops are the future, there have been many attempts in the past but they never really worked, technology has advaced a lot since then and has enabled us to create for the fist time a really good user experience

These guys are amazing, I met with them a couple of years ago at MIT while they were going through GFSA and showed me an early prototype of horbito, weren't you called Inevio back then?

Yes! We recently changed our name to horbito, do you like the change?

Pretty sure some of us still have WeeZeel t-shirts around!

This feels like it has potential. Can someone give me a specific use-case where this should shine?

The major worry I have is that it will turn out like the Citrix system at my university. It's hard to give all the reasons why Citrix is annoying, but the top three are: 1. speed (horbito seems fast though), 2. awkward feeling of two operating systems, 3. pesky, unanticipated clunkiness when saving and retrieving data.

I'm not knocking this, just curious.

Don't think about horbito like an OS (yet), think about it like Google Drive on steroids.

Right now horbito is a great solution for teams, being able to work online with a much better user experience than old cloud (introducing windows and multitasking inside a website) and collaborating on real time while always being up to date on everything that's happening on your team thanks to Cosmos.

I really think Cosmos is a big revolution for teams because it's a well executed Yammer/Facebook for work due to being perfectly integrated with your workflow, you needn't stop work to report what your doing, as soon as you save you can share and post all the changes with your coworkers.

That makes sense. I guess I don't work enough in teams to have instantly seen the value. It's weird, actually, I see a lot of references to collaboration, either indirectly while reading articles, or directly on videos promoting collaboration tools. But in reality I don't collaborate very often other than via Slack. I wonder if it's just me or if collaboration is portrayed/perceived in an unrealistic way.

I'm sorry but I don't get it, why would I want another layer over my OS to access my apps?

The web wasn't really created for the use that is given today and we're using our browsers like a pseudo-OS, this causes that webapps can't talk between each other and it requires a specific integration with each one of the services you want your app to communicate with.

However, when you develop an app for Windows or Mac you needn't worry about integrations, it's already integrated with all the installed programs on the computer out of the box, it's the OS who is in charge of managing the communication between apps.

To me it seems that we don't really use our OS anymore, we do all our work online/cloud (Dropbox, Drive, Slack, Trello, Gmail...) so it makes sense to unify all our services into one place

This is actually pretty impressive... How much money have you guys raised so far?

Hello! We've actually raised around $200k and received around $100k from awards

Amazing, I would love to read technical details, and how it's made.

Thank you!! We use ArangoDB, MySQL, Mongo, Redis, Node.js, JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, we might be doing a blog post explaining our tech in the near future!.

By the way, we are having a discussion right now on Product Hunt, feel free to leave an upvote if you like horbito!

For what you are using ArangoDB?

You should totally turn this into a Mac app.

We're actually developing a Mac & Windows App right now...

Just hunted this on Product Hunt, absolutely stunning! Awesome job guys :)

Thank you! We weren't expecting anyone to hunt us!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com