Nimbus - SSC '13

EDIT: Nimbus is coming soon. Like us on facebook to keep up with the latest info! [link]

Well, here it is! (finally!). My first submission in nearly 4 years that breaks the food naming scheme .

OS: Windows 7
Shell: Nimbus Shell
Video: Nimbus Video Player
Audio: Nimbus Audio Player
File Browser: Nimbus Shell
Browser: Nimbus Web Browser
Icons: Nimbus
Wall: 90 Mile Beach (colors edited)


You might be thinking that this is a good ol Visual Style + TT + Litestep stack, but ohohoho you'd be very wrong.

edit: sorry for wall of text

My goal for this shot was to re-examine the fundamentals of an OS, and really see what would be possible if you broke all the rules. So I scrapped Litestep and explorer entirety for a completely custom build. Everything you see on-screen (save for the photographs) was hand-designed and hand-coded from scratch. It's Windows underneath, but a completely different beast on top.

Nimbus is a shell replacement & app suite that I'm prototyping for large and small screens. The whole thing is scripted in javascript and styled with standard webtech (css + html). This means that everything, everything from the taskbar, to the icons, to the apps and windows themselves are built from the ground up with html, styled with css, and scripted with javascript.

Using websockets, the shell actually syncs across devices in realtime, so you can move an app running on your desktop to your mobile, just as if your laptop and smartphone were running the same operating system, connected to the same hardware. You can even set it so that your actions on the phone are mirrored (more-or-less) 1:1 on the desktop. The UI is designed so that cross-platform interactions make sense. This is especially nice when using the music & video apps (sit back, and control with your phone ).

In terms of usability: It's a prototype shell. It breaks more often than not, especially when you have multiple devices trying to sync with each other. One great thing about this shell, however, is that it runs seamlessly alongside your existing OS, so I've been running it on its own desktop alongside my normal Windows 7 install. I was hoping to upload the mobile shot of the shell too, but I haven't been able to make it pretty yet.

The shell is very much pre-alpha, but it's currently running on iPhone, Android, Windows 7, Ubuntu, and (probably OSX ). Basically, if your device can run a webkit capable browser (preferably chrome), it will run. My goal is to get litestep-levels of customization on all platforms (desktop & mobile) and most basic apps. That release is still a far from happening, but this is the real first step in showing that it's a feasible idea! I'm super happy with the way this turned out and am happy to share it with you guys first