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Comment by jefffoster | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen http://www.spoon.net/? It seems very similar to the StackVM idea.

They poorly handle the OS requirements (both in terms of implementation and notification). I had to go into the FAQ to find this:

> Spoon currently supports Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, Firefox 3 and 3.5, and Safari 2, 3, and 4, on the Windows platform. Support for the Chrome and Opera browsers is coming soon!

Which isn't even mentioned where you might expect - where they discuss the plug-in. If you go to any individual app in Linux (Chrome, FF3.5) you just get "this browser isn't supported".

Wow I had no idea! StackVM is all html and javascript and we've taken great care to make sure it works on all browsers without any silly plugins.

you might want to rethink about plugins depending on your expected audience. People who are looking for good remote desktop solutions would be OK with installing plugins. I played the game on the front page on spoon.net and there was very little lag, it was a smooth experience. People who use remote desktop would prefer smooth experience over ease of installation.

We plan to offer some kind of rdesktop or vnc backend for powerusers, since our software hooks into these on the backend anyways. This is a useful point!

Completely disagree with this idea. If you can avoid browser plugins without major issue, and it seems you have been successful at that so far, by all means continue to do so. Not only will the technorati appreciate not having to install yet another piece of (usually unnecessary) software, but corporate customers will be more inclined to deploy in their environments if it means there won't be another piece of software for them to install and maintain across their entire enterprise.

curious: Did you ever have to access computers using a web interface remote desktop client? Very few of them are good and does the job. Anyone who wants to do something real would no doubt install the plugin. Also in the winXP demo there was obviously a lag between the real cursor and the cursor on VM. It might not seem annoying until you need to use it for an extended period of time.

I agree that they should avoid plugins if their app works fine on html & js, however, this is unlikely with the current html and js. (Think of playing games). Maybe with the improvements in HTML5 this might be achievable, but currently it's not.

Hmm. Where to start...

1. This isn't a web-based remote desktop client. 2. Your concept of "something real" is clearly different from mine. 3. Their app appears to work very well, in my opinion, without having to resort to browser plugin messiness. 4. This particular solution's primary value proposition is that it will work on almost any recent browser, without other installed software.

Thanks for pointing this out! Spoon seems to have found a nice niche in hosting up individual applications. StackVM right now is more about the entire operating system and geared towards hackers for the time being, but we may pivot into other areas. There are a lot of potential niches in this domain which is part of the reason why the problem is so exciting!

I hadn't seen spoon.net! Now investigating!

But just another interesting web service that demands my card details before it will tell me how much anything costs! Fundamental mistake? I think so...

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