Be Excellent To Each Other

There have been a few technologies offering this sort of stuff over the last few months, but this looks seriously impressive.

It's an offering from VMWare called AppBlast. What it basically offers is the ability to run any application that runs on Windows, OSX, or Linux, in a browser. What it's doing is spinning up a desktop VM in a cloud and then delivering the application UI to your desktop (or tablet) device in the browser. And as it's doing all the processing on the back end and only doing the UI stuff locally (like Citrix or TS does), you can do silly things like run Photoshop on an iPad.

I can't see the video at work, but that sounds pretty cool!

It officially offers OS X? My take is that's a breach of Apple's license, but I can't imagine VMWare would do that. Interesting. Maybe it's hosted on Mac hardware and that's enough to satisfy them.

Good question. According to the video it does officially offer OSX. I'm not sure how they get around that from a licensing perspective, but I'm assuming they must have. I find it hard to believe they've got a load of bits of Mac hardware lying around to run this on, especially as VMWare are a virtualisation company.

The Lion license says you can virtualise Lion as long as the host is also Lion. Not much wriggle room there.

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/01/os- ... alization/

Previously, OS X said:


Lion (which doesn't have a Server version) says:


Either way, the host OS has to be OS X.

Presumably I could run another browser as the app - it would make all the browser compatibility testing some people have to do a lot easier. Also, with clever VPN-ness or whatever, I could do all my heavyweight compiling / video editing / complicated accounting on a netbook from anywhere with a decent net connection.

There is a lot of discussions at work about this concept. 'The Cloud, Apps on demand, and cloud in a box' etc etc..


It is all good stuff, but it reminds of Thin Client stuff, and can only work if you have a network connection, so working 'offline' could be difficult.

I want to see how many layers it can run, I want to run it in a browser, then run a browser in it, then run a browser in my vm in a browser, then ... well, I am sure you get what I mean.

Have you fallen asleep on an aeroplane lately?

I tried that on Browserstack. The developer told me on Twitter that it theoretically goes to an infinite number of levels, but please for the love of god don't do it.