Announcing Tonido

It has been a year since my jumped off the cliff post that kickstarted CodeLathe. And since then 2008 has turned out to have been a long turbulent year, a historic and a momentous year as well an incredible low year as gloom and the crisis over the economy darkens and threatens to engulf the world. It has been a year of triumphs for some and a year of despair for many.

But 2008 is historic for us here at CodeLathe. It was the year that we built Tonido. It was the year, that we have slogged thousands of hours night and day. It was the year of sacrifices - when all other simple pleasures in life were given up for one overriding goal. It was the year, when our families and loved ones saw less of us and we saw less of them because we were bent hard at the pedal, pushing down, to get past one more mountain peak; and when after climbing one peak, there still remained an endless vista of peaks still remaining to be conquered. It was the year of incredible loneliness; and somehow remaining motivated every single day and having the energy and enthusiasm to drag ourselves out of bed and to begin work on one more issue. It was the year, when at times, it seemed that toiling away was worth nothing and it was better to give up and call it a day.

But I am glad we didn’t give up. I am glad we just didn’t say this is too much work or this won’t work or nobody will want it or nobody will care.

I am glad we stuck to what we wanted to do. Because there is no sweeter thing than to say “We did it”.

We, the CodeLathe team are happy to announce Tonido.

Tonido (pronounced Tone-ee-doh) is an application platform supporting a variety of useful applications that blurs the distinction between the web and the desktop.

Tonido runs locally on your computer whether it is running Windows, MacOS or Linux. But unlike normal desktop applications, Tonido’s UI is accessed through a web browser. When you interact and use Tonido applications you are interacting completely with your local Tonido instance and never with any third party web server. Since Tonido is accessed via your browser, it doesn’t matter if you are sitting in front of your computer or in another machine in your intranet or half way across the world. You get the same  application UI. If you wish to access Tonido’s UI via the internet, any time you create a Tonido profile, you are given a unique URL that directly allows you access to your machine. Tonido works offline or online - you don’t have to be connected to the internet to access data of your Tonido applications.

That is one half of Tonido’s capability. The other half is how Tonido interacts with other Tonido instances. Tonido can communicate directly with other Tonido instances via the Tonido network, with no data being channeled via third parties except for initial handshaking. Thus Tonido instances can communicate, sync and share with other Tonido instances.

Tonido is extensible with applications that are managed as plug-ins. The base Tonido system by itself, just offers these facilities which applications are free to take advantage of. Tonido beta will ship with four applications and more are in the pipeline.

Tonido is completely private. CodeLathe’s Tonido Domain Server (a.k.a Directory Server) only does two things - helps make connections between two Tonido instances and helps provide a unique URL to access your Tonido instance if you choose to from anywhere in the world. The rest is completely private. CodeLathe does not and cannot access your profile data, and communications do not flow via CodeLathe, so it remains private as well.

Tonido is built from the ground up to be  secure. Even though Tonido has powerful networking capabilities, by default, Tonido runs in a secure mode. You will need to explicitly enable access from a remote location into Tonido. All Tonido-to-Tonido communication is encrypted. And there is a powerful set of filters that allows/disallow access by IP ranges. There is even support to prevent Phishing.

Tonido is a development platform. This means that while the initial plug-ins will be released by CodeLathe, other third party application developers are free to develop using the Tonido Platform SDK that will be released shortly. Since the Tonido Platform abstracts many of the really hard problems associated with writing web and direct connection based network applications, third party developers will be able to develop new powerful and innovative applications hereto not seen.

There is more to Tonido, but let’s cover those functions in detail in future posts. Let’s talk next about applications that will ship initially with Tonido.

Tonido Jukebox

An easy-to-use music player and sharing application that allows you to listen to your music collection from anywhere, and share your music collection with friends and family

Tonido Photos

A simple to use photo sharing tool that saves you from wasting time in uploading or downloading photos. Just select a folder, share it with a group and Tonido Photos does the rest. Photos are transferred to your friends in the group quickly and directly, no need for uploads to third party servers.

Tonido Webshare

Share large files or photo galleries directly from your desktop. Webshare is a simple alternative to using cumbersome ftp or uploading files into external servers.  Webshare is a perfect solution if you want to share confidential files with a selected set of people.

Tonido Workspace

Workspace is a Personal Information Manager that you can access from anywhere and a Collaboration Software that helps you manage simple or complex projects securely and privately without the need for using a third party server. It allows you to seamlessly work with your distributed team/family/friends. It provides unique hierarchical information management using tasks, calendars, contacts, chat, file sharing, forum and notes.

Increasing popularity of web applications in recent years brings us to a crossroads where we sacrifice privacy for the sake of convenience. With Tonido, you need not sacrifice privacy for convenience. If you don’t like your personal data residing on  public servers, or if you want total control of your data or if you want to access your applications from anywhere without sacrificing privacy, Tonido is the right choice for you.

We hope you enjoy using Tonido, and have as much fun using it as we had building it.

Interested? Sign up to get a beta invitation. We will release more details out about the Tonido platform and the rest of the applications soon. And watch out for the Tonido.com site to become live in a short while.