I should clarify what I said in the last post... We aren't getting rid of the desktop paradigm. I think a well polished desktop is important. However, the goal is not to make a perfect copy of a "real" desktop. It's actually to take the desktop paradigm, and adapt it for the web. I'll also elaborate on what I mean by the "good parts of the web".

The web is a great platform for applications. It's central nature allows for ease of communication. It also makes it easy to share things because it is publicly accessible. Lastly, the web is great because it's accessible from everywhere, including mobile phones. That said, current desktops such as gnome, windows, etc. lack the ability to do incorporate this in their design. What I want to do in Lucid is incorporate these aspects of the web into the desktop.

An example would be the phone interface that we will be working on in 1.1. It will provide an alternate interface that allows javascript-enabled devices with limited screen real estate to run the full-blown desktop applications. Because the web is accessible from phones, we can actually pull this off. The current solutions, however, can't because of their decentralized nature.

Another example is the public frontend that we wanted. Each user of the desktop would have a public website. Applications would be able to publish things to the personal website. For example, I could have a photos application that would allow me to publish a photo album that I could send to my friends. Current desktops can't do this; you need to upload them to something like Flickr. Because Lucid is on the web though, we can. That said, I'm not against syncing with Flickr, it's just that I feel a seamless integration with the web leads to a more usable interface.

So, hopefully that cleared up the last post. I do think that having things like an office suite are important, but I'm not going to limit us to making a carbon-copy of a desktop environment. I want to expand upon that, and make it a desktop for the web, and not just a web-based desktop.

I have read a lot of people's thoughts about the web desktop, and I completely agree with them. The web desktop is a failed attempt to recreate a desktop experience in a browser. That's really what it boils down to. From the start, I've always thought that web desktops were a great idea, but nobody seemed to be doing them a justice. All we have are copies of the existing desktop environment, except much, much worse. We understand this point of view completely, and we want to change that.

Instead of giving you a web-based desktop, we want to give you a desktop for the web. Rather then giving you a carbon-copy of everything that's been done before, we want to actually make the web desktop useful, and bring the good parts of the web into the desktop experience. We also want it to integrate with your existing desktop, and make the two seamless. Lastly, we want to give you total access from your mobile devices, and allow you to run the same applications you would from your desktop on your phone.

The other web desktops don't seem to get this point of view. All they seem to do is copy what's been done before (I'm not aiming at any specific project, just in general). YouOS understood this point of view completely though; they wanted to make the web desktop a completely social environment. In a way we feel that PD is a continuation of where YouOS left off, and we felt really bad that things didn't work out so well for them.

So, we don't want to reproduce what's already been done. If anything, we want to make something that questions the very nature of the existing web desktops. Our 1.0 release will appear like a carbon-copy of the other projects, but don't let this fool you. Starting at 1.1, we have a whole bunch of innovative things that we want to do. Keep in mind that we are a very small team of developers, and we need more help if we ever want to reach this goal. If you agree with us, and want to help us out, please don't hesitate to let us know.

Thanks to some optimizations in our build system, all (if not most) of the apps now load in under a second. This really makes the desktop feel much more responsive. Even the biggest app, the Administration Panel loads quickly. This load time improvement will be in the beta 5 release.

This beta was mainly released to fix a minor security problem. It is strongly recommended that you upgrade as soon as you can. Aside from that, we've removed the extra themes to reduce the download size. They are now available from our SVN repository. We've also included an instant messenger application, as well as some of bugfixes (including a few to crosstalk). Lastly, we've added some French translations (still a work in progress).

Enjoy!

Downloads

• .tar.gz archive (10.1mb)
• .zip archive (12.6mb)
• Installation Instructions

Lots of progress has been made, mainly with documentation. There are a handful of things that still need to be documented for the developer documentation. The user docs are far from finished, but the installation documentation is pretty much finished.

As for progress on the actual desktop, a few things have been done. The login form has been modified a little bit, and looks much nicer. Also, we've decided to remove the Green and Tsunami themes in order to cut down on the download size. They will be available as separate packages when we release 1.0. We've added an 'Open with' dialog, so you can select the program manually. We've also started working on an internal instant messaging app using the crosstalk library. It's still a bit buggy, but the bugs can be fixed pretty easily, it's just a matter of getting them done. There's still some things that have to be done before beta4, such as fixing some IE bugs, fixing the uploader so flash 10 is supported, and putting the finishing touches on the IM app.

Now, I'd like to know what you guys think about our documentation in the comments. How well written are they? Should they be structured differently? Do some things need to be elaborated on? The new site should have comments for each documentation page, but I'd still like to know what you think of them now so we can fix the problems sooner.

Stay tuned!

Update: the IM app is finished now, it just needs to be translated.

Hey everyone. I've been wondering what you guys are thinking about PD, but you haven't been to vocal in the forums. I've allowed anonymous users to post comments so that you don't have to hassle with registering.

I'd like to know what you think about PD. What could be improved? What makes it awesome? What killer feature do you need, but we don't have yet?

I'd especially like to know what you guys think about the documentation. It's a work in progress, but it's coming out pretty nicely.

It'll be too late to get your suggestions into 1.0, but they will definitely be taken into consideration when we plan the 1.1 release.

I'll also be reading anything you say with the #lucid tag on both Twitter and identi.ca.

You're input is appreciated!

We've found a security problem that affects all versions of Psych Desktop. The problem involves the public/ directory, which was not protected by a .htaccess file, allowing an attacker to upload a PHP script and execute it. The file for beta3 has been patched to prevent this from happening, however, the new package still has to be copied to the mirrors, which will take a few minutes.

The fix does not require you to re-install anything, all you need to do is copy the '.htaccess' file from files/ to public/. All users of Psych Desktop are encouraged to fix this immediately.

We try our best to keep Psych Desktop as secure as possible, but sometimes things like this slip. We've notified everyone we could find who had a Psych Desktop installation about this issue, and they have hopefully fixed the problem.

We finally got sphinx set up on the server to automatically build the documentation. You can access it here:
http://www.psychdesktop.net/docs/index.html

When we get the new site setup, it will be presented inside of the site itself, but for now this will do.

This release contains a bunch of bug fixes since beta2, as well as some polishing. Some of the changes include:

• A new Flash-based uploader
• New contacts app (import/export vcard still temperamental)
• Updated to Dojo 1.2.0
• Namespace changes (api.* and login.* merged into desktop.*, see this for more details)
• Context menu for window titles and taskbar items (allows you to float windows on top, among other things)
• Word processor has more formating options
• Packages now have version compatibility metadata
• Update manager (won't work until the new site is finished)
• Theme polishing
• Apps now show currently opened file in their window title
• Various fixes to Katana IDE

Also, we've written some new documentation, including an installation guide. Documentation is still a work-in-progress, but things are moving steadily.

Download

• .tar.gz archive (17.1mb)
• .zip archive (21.5mb)

Full change list
Known issues

Recently, we've been migrating our documentation over to sphinx. We've also written a few pages of documentation that cover some of the components of the desktop. You can take a look at what's being done on the documentation page. Unfortunately it looks like we won't be able to use the Api Reference tool until the Dojo guys have gotten the performance kinks out of it. The documentation comments are still inline with the apis, however, so you can just look at the source if you wish.

Also, I'm glad to say that the desktop is only using one namespace now. api.* and login.* have moved to the desktop namespace. Any widgets were moved to desktop.widget.* (including api.Window), and api.ui.* is now in desktop.dialog.* (drop the last 'Dialog' off of the method and you'll have the new method's name). login.* is now in desktop.login.*. We're considering renaming 'desktop' to 'lucid' to save some typing, but the decision isn't final yet.

Oh, and maybe you've noticed that http://www.lucid-desktop.org/ is showing a 403 error, that's going to be like that until we get everything set up there, which will (hopefully) be pretty soon.