Friday, January 26th, 2007
Omnidrive: Ajax file explorer access to your files from anywhere
Omnidrive has a remarkably rich Ajax interface to their server backend (as well as mac and windows clients).
When you login to the web based file explorer you quickly see that the experience looks very desktop-like. Right-click menus, drag and drop, and more.
Nik Cubrilovic (CEO) sees OmniDrive as “an open storage platform with a web interface and desktop clients, it allows users to store all their data in a single place, and their data can then be accessed from web apps, different computers and devices etc.
We see ourselves as an aggregator of web-related data – for eg. With Omnidrive you are able to add folders for each of your web apps (eg. Gmail, flickr, etc.) and then have read/write access to that data.”
Since it is a storage platform, they are looking at partnering with companies (such as an announcement with Zoho last week). They are looking for developers with apps to integrate with, such as photo editors, sound editors, image viewers, media players – basically any app that is good and solid and that our users would want to use with their files.
They look like they are using a lot of libraries out there. A simple view-source shows:
- Prototype / Rico / Script.aculo.us
- DWR
- Misc components (window, layout managers, etc)





very nice! some ideas in that, which I must grab for my KFM project ;-) (http://kfm.verens.com/ – another ajax file browser)
I got an account and found it very buggy with usability problems.
Hi Rickdog, Nik from Omnidrive here – could you be a bit more specific with the bugs you encountered please? The web interface works with IE, FF, Safari and Konqueror and we don’t have any known bugs at the moment.
Nik
We’ve been using Omnidrive in dev for ages now. Brilliant. Works like magic.
Great to see my work on Ajaxian.