Overcast skies: what cloud computing should be?

From an consumer perspective the Cloud is opaque. Online storage and the rise of web applications are changing the way users work. There continues though to be no distinction from a user experience point of view between accessing a Cloud-based application and accessing a web application deployed on a classic server. We propose a new paradigm for online application development which takes the best from web applications, thick client applications and the new "application store" market. This approach expands the cloud to encompass all resources that belong to a user; be it local client resources or server-farm resources procured using a traditional cloud model. By implementing these concepts we can bring the benefits of cloud computing directly to the end user while breaking developers out of the confines of the web browser.