Gladinet Cloud Desktop – Access remote PCs, web applications, and online storage from your desktop

Posted on December 24, 2008 at 5:57 am

Earlier I wrote about a service called FanBox that allowed you to create your own web-based desktop, but it didn’t work very well at all. I also wrote about how you can turn web applications into desktop apps with Bubbles.

But they are not the only ones coming up with software that does this! I previously wrote a post on three projects that are moving web apps to the desktop, including Google Gears, Adobe AIR, and Mozilla Prism.

But now another company has taken it even further! What does it do? Basically it delivers web applications, remote PCs, and online storage all to your desktop.

Gladinet is a really cool piece of software that includes pieces of Web 3.0 software, P2P software, and web services. It is a cloud desktop application that enables web apps to access local data, local apps to access web data, remote and local computers to access each other, and data access from both desktops and webtops.

So you might be asking yourself, what exactly does this software do? It was designed to deliver web content and web services to your desktop. What the heck does that mean?

It means that you may have files stored online or stored on different computers (office, home, etc) and Gladinet will allow you to access all of your files together from your Windows desktop or your online desktop.

It also means you can remotely access data stored online, such as online storage services, as if they were local folders. For example, do you have an Amazon S3 account? What about Google Picasa, Flickr, Microsoft SkyDrive, or Google Docs? You can access all of those online storage sites just like folders in Windows.

It also means you can use web applications locally. For example, you can use Google Docs to open local Word documents or Excel spreadsheets without having to open your browser, log into Google Docs, and upload the file.

You can also use Picknik, a free online photo editor, to open up local pictures and images. But it works both ways! So you can open your Google Picasa pictures on your local copy of Adobe Photoshop as if you were working on the file locally!

Gladinet also uses a VPN type of technology, so you can remote desktop or VNC into another PC as if all of the PC’s were on the same network. No need to configure remote desktop port forwarding on your router or anything else! It just works!

The other cool thing is that once you create an account, you can access everything from your online desktop, which means you can access your files and data from any computer in the world.

It also has some pretty neat file sharing capabilities, so you can easily send your files or folders to friends and they do not need to have the Gladinet software in other to access the data.

Other nifty features include a Favorites manager, so you can consolidate all your different bookmarks from different computers into one. It also has a password manager and supports single sign-on into Google Mail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar.

Overall, it’s a very cool application of cloud computing and I would suggest you check it out since it has so many cool features! Enjoy!

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Comments

2 Responses to “Gladinet Cloud Desktop – Access remote PCs, web applications, and online storage from your desktop”

remote desktop software said on : July 23rd, 2009 at 10:45 am

Thanks for posting! It’s funny, I’ve been resisting cloud computing because I like to know my data is actually in my computer arranged in magnet dust on my hard drive. I know this doesn’t change that issue, but something about integrating the cloud onto my desktop makes me feel more comfortable with cloud computing. Of course I know where the data is, there’s an icon right on my desktop!

aziz said on : November 23rd, 2009 at 1:59 pm

Hey aseem, Gladinet is a very nice application, thats why I have subscribed to your newsletter! Thanks!