YouOS was started by four developers: Jeff, Joe, Sam, Srini. A sneak preview of our biographies is available on the About Us page.

YouOS is an experimental, collaborative web operating system. Be sure to check out our propaganda.

Sam and Joe live in Silicon Valley, while Jeff and Srini live in San Francisco. Our corporate office is in Palo Alto, a bit of a drive from our server farm in San Francisco. We manage. Need to get a hold of us? Here's our contact information.

The YouOS code line was first started in very late December, 2005.

We set out to answer the following questions:

• Wouldn't it be sweet if open source development was more like a multiplayer game, complete with rankings and all?
• What are the implications of being able to share windows through a buddy list when we're working?
• Is it even possible to build an OS that is built on sharing from the ground up? Like Kindergarten?
• What if the OS itself was the community? Discuss.

We're still searching, and YouOS is the search engine. Well, it's not a search engine, but you get the analogy, right?

We've started putting together a tutorial section entitled "YouTut".

We regularly test and develop YouOS on Internet Explorer 6.0, Firefox 1.0.7, and Firefox 1.5 on Windows and Firefox 1.5 on Mac.

YouOS may or may not work in other browsers; we welcome suggestions on making the client compatible with more browsers.

The YouOS REST server APIs, on the other hand, should work in most browsers and in any device that can do HTTP. You are welcome and encouraged to use these APIs as you see fit - even if that means you want to write your own client.

The client side javascript is available under a modified BSD license. You can view the source code here or download the gzipped tarball here.

Right-click anywhere on the desktop to bring out the context menu, click Change Wallpaper and then select the wallpaper you want. Hit apply, then save.

Click the YouOS menu button on the top left corner of your desktop. Then scroll down to "Add/Remove Apps". Click on it to bring up an application window from where you can manage your existing applications.

In the top left of the installer windows is the a menu with option "Manage", "Add New", and "Refresh". Click on "Add New".

Now, use the gray toolbar menu at the top to scroll through the available apps. Click on the install button to add applications to your YouOS taskbar menu.

Log in to YouOS. You must be a registered user to develop apps. Then, pick "Develop Apps" from the YouOS menu.

You will need to know or learn JavaScript to write YouOS apps. The trac wiki is a good place to learn the basics of YouOS development and, more importantly, the JavaScript language.

Click on the blue system monitor icon to the upper left of your screen, this will bring up a program called YouProc from which you can manually kill programs.

See below.

Open File Explorer. Then in the File menu you'll find "Upload" and "Download".

250MB of disk space and 1GB of bandwidth per month. This will probably be expanded in the future.

Keep using it so you can provide us with valuable feedback! It is being rapidly developed and feedback keeps us going!

Also check out the development wiki. You can contribute by adding to it, or better yet, by writing your own YouOS apps.

Inside of YouOS, click on "Feedback" from the YouOS menu. Outside of YouOS, you can go to the development wiki and click on "New Ticket".

Once in Trac, you can provide a title, summary, and priority for your ticket. For bugs, we'd be obliged if you'd provide us your desktop OS and browser info as well.

You can try the forums or email us directly at help@youos.com

We'd like to thank users treymonty and GilesCela for their help in writing this FAQ.