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Tonido: Cloudless Computing On Your Desktop

via MakeUseOf.com by Damien Oh on 4/10/09

While there are plenty of sites that allows you to upload your files and share with others, there might be a handful of you that are paranoid about the privacy of your data or who are concerned that your data will get lost when the third party sites go out of business. Tonido could be the solution to tackle this. With Tonido, you can now create a web server and access/share your local files online.

The concept behind Tonido is simple. Instead of storing all your data on a third party site and worrying about your privacy, you can instead keep all your files on your local hard drive and use a web server to connect to your computer. There is no need to worry about your data being lost, and you are able to have access to your files, be it online or offline.

tonido-dashboard

In fact, if you take the extra effort to try out Tonido, you will find that it is more than just a web server. It is more of a desktop suite that comes with various extensible applications to allow you to organize your photos, music, project collaborations and a Personal Information Manager (PIM) to manage your personal life.

When you first install Tonido, it will prompt you to create a profile. This profile will be the account that you use to access your desktop, both online and offline.

Once you have logged into the dashboard, you should see all the applications line up on the left pane.

Jukebox

tonido-jukebox

The Jukebox module is where you can import all your music and play them over the Web.

Photos

tonido-photos

Instead of uploading all your photos to Flickr or Photobucket just to share them with your friends, you can easily create a share group and share all your photos with others within this Photos modules. You can also tag and comment on other people's photos.

Thots

tonido-thots

Fancy a personal blog but do not want others to see it? The Thots application serves as a diary or a personal journal where you can post random thoughts to it.

Several things that Thots allows you to do: keep a personal journal to record the events in your life, Twitter support to share individual thots, bookmark webpages and clipping text from the web (with Firefox plugins) and many other things you can do with a blog.

Webshare

tonido-webshare

Whenever you need to share a file or folder from your desktop, there is no need to zip it up and upload it to the web anymore. With Webshare, you can easily add your folders and share them with your friends.

Workspace

tonido-workspace

Tasks, Calendar, Contacts, Notes and Files all in one place. You can use the Workspace to enter your appointments of the days, the tasks that need to be done and all the contacts you have. On the front, you will be able to see a quick summary of all the appointments for the day, to do list and so on. There is even a feed module that you can subscribe to so you won't ever forget anything.

One thing that I find lacking is an email module to access your email.

Remote Web Access

By default, the remote web access is disabled. Luckily, you can quickly turn it on without much fiddling around. On the center of the dashboard, you can find a link "Run Web Access Setup Wizard". Click on that and follow a few steps. In as little as 5 minutes, you will be able to get a connection to the web and access your data anywhere with Internet access.

tonido-webaccess

Tonido runs on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux) and it is free for personal use. There is no mention of pricing on the site, but it seems that there will be a premium version in the future.

Overall, Tonido is a great software with plenty of useful applications for web workers. I certainly find myself using it very often on my Linux computer. What about you?

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