Demonstration of Robin Remote XUL Desktop Available

Friday June 27th, 2003

Gerald Bauer wrote in to tell us about Robin (Remote Operating System Build in Netscape), a remote XUL desktop environment created by Randall Knutson. A live pre-alpha demo of Robin is available, featuring a basic Windows 9x style user interface and a selection of XUL games. Robin isn't written exclusively in XUL: it also makes use of DHTML, JavaScript and "some crazy hacks". The XUL News Wire has more information about Robin.

#1 Great!

by beniarto

Saturday June 28th, 2003 12:46 AM

This is good, really good. The best thing about it is that it will spark some ideas and new possibilities in everybody's mind. Hopefully this will start a very long list of this new hybrid of web application.

All thumbs up!!

#2 Great for thin clients and web/served apps.

by bandido

Saturday June 28th, 2003 2:27 AM

wow, that is awesome. When MS started fighting Netscape years ago it was because they were afraid that NS was going to take control of the desktop UI and have applications running on the browser. This application has the potential to do just that. Applications on the server or remote locations and running on a browser that simulates a desktop.

How i get to move in Pagman? Anyone know?

#3 Re: Great for thin clients and web/served apps.

by eiseli

Saturday June 28th, 2003 3:46 AM

You can play these games and others here: http://games.mozdev.org/ for pagman use the arrow keys (the seem to not work on Robin, but they do in the original mozdev app.

#8 typeahead find?

by beastie

Saturday June 28th, 2003 1:09 PM

At least for me, typeahead find is getting in the way sometimes. I have it set to search all text by default, and when I press 'n' in Xultris, it selects the 'n' instead of starting.

#12 Type ahead find

by Racer

Sunday June 29th, 2003 3:32 PM

I turned type ahead find off long ago. Useless feature as far as I'm concerned...especially given that Ctrl+F is nearly as easy to use and only activates when I tell it to.

#14 Re: Type ahead find

by AlexBishop

Monday June 30th, 2003 8:07 AM

"I turned type ahead find off long ago. Useless feature as far as I'm concerned...especially given that Ctrl+F is nearly as easy to use and only activates when I tell it to."

/ is faster. :-)

Alex

#10 Pagman Move

by beniarto

Sunday June 29th, 2003 1:32 AM

Press your tab key a few times until the 'active window' is the pagman game (It works in Firebird 0.6). After that use the arrow keys.

It took me quite sometime to find how things work :) But this is very natural for a pre-alpha demo.

I still can't get Moxula to work though. Anyone?

#11 Re: Pagman Move

by lladnar1

Sunday June 29th, 2003 8:45 AM

I have not yet finished writing Moxula. I was hoping to get it done before people noticed the page but that did not happen. It is planned to be a browser within the browser. (Kind of silly I know but cool)

Rndall

#13 Finished

by Racer

Sunday June 29th, 2003 3:35 PM

Well, when you're finished writing, be sure to send us (mozillaZine) an official update sometime so we can all check it out.

#15 Moxula Test

by beniarto

Tuesday July 8th, 2003 2:28 AM

I use moxula to submit this talkback.

I wonder what will happen if I tried to open robin.sourceforge.net on moxula?

#4 Been there done that

by erik

Saturday June 28th, 2003 5:44 AM

This isn't very new. There has been tons (well a few) of these, some even commercial but none have succeseeded.

http://www.desktop.com (commercial, not available any more) http://www.webos.com (commercial, not available any more) http://sourceforge.net/projects/netwindows/ (not exactly a DE but a simple gui toolkit) http://sourceforge.net/projects/dynapi/ (not exactly a DE but a simple gui toolkit) http://www.forgetfoo.com/foodesktop/ (basic window manager like Robin) http://desktop.fcuk-me.net (basic window manager like Robin) tons more but I've yet to see one as good as the WebOS one.

#5 cool

by avih

Saturday June 28th, 2003 6:12 AM

that's just way too cool :)

#6 Screenshots...?

by Kovu

Saturday June 28th, 2003 8:23 AM

Screenshots would be nice.

#7 Re: ...

by tve

Saturday June 28th, 2003 8:50 AM

who needs screenshots when there's a live demo? http://robin.sourceforge.net/ ;-)

#9 Interesting...

by beg_ne

Saturday June 28th, 2003 7:06 PM

Interesting and kind of cool. Though it seems to load very slowly on my admittedly lame 56K connection.

But for doing simple things like games etc. Wouldn't it be much better to use something like java applets instead? Atleast then the games would be "real" they could have sound effects and music etc. While the games in the demo seem to work on the frist keypress then break(atleast in Firebird) while the Pagman ghosts travel around the board at 1 frame per second.