Spoon is an amazing example of just what is possible in the cloud. To put it simply, Spoon is a browser plugin that allows for the sandboxing of applications into a virtualized environment. What does that mean? With Spoon you can execute programs without the need for local installation. This is highly useful if you wish to get a quick overview of an applications capabilities without cluttering your system.
The use extends even further. Do you have that one application that still requires Internet Explorer 6 but your environment is Windows 7 based? With Spoon you can run IE6 transparently; or any browser version for that matter!
Load up the spoon.net website and click the Install Spoon Plugin link.
The plugin is delivered in your typical .exe installer – execute it upon completion of the download. No further interaction is necessary!
With the plugin now installed return to the Spoon website and access the Spoon App Library.
Applications are organized by categories and sub-categories – the collection is surprisingly vast in my opinion. Spoon allows you to try out applications without cluttering your entire system. Here we can test out the open-source iTunes equivalent Songbird. Does it hold up to the venerable iTunes? Who knows but now you have no reason to not give it a go right?
After a quick and free registration process, the application will begin downloading as indicated by the overlay in the lower right hand portion of your browser window.
A few moments later, Songbird is up and running within the Spoon sandbox.
Songbird added roughly 30MB of system memory overhead in my testing, so while it’s not exactly lightweight it’s offerings more than offset the resource allocations.
Spoon is compatible with all the major browsers currently available: Firefox, IE, Chrome, and Safari for Windows. Testing was done within Firefox 4.
