My goal this weekend is to build a simple iPhone application and get it submitted to the app store. Along with me maybe some liquor, pizza and mt dew.
I have an idea that hit me this morning and a few simple sketches, I may blog as I go to get a feeling.
I am going to break this down into several sections, firstly looking at the software, probably the most interesting part. Then the hardware which currently is the most useful part of the whole ordeal. Then finally some of the comparisons between other systems.
I have been using the CR48/ChromeOS as my primary laptop for 4 weeks now and over Christmas at my parents as my main computer for 2 weeks. So I have had some time as using it has my computer, with the iPad fulfilling all game and multimedia options. In a nutshell basic browsing, email and sshing to my mac for emacs and alpine. Right before I got the CR48 in the mail, I had sold my MacbookPro since the iPad did most of what I needed and the Macbook had not left the house for over 2 months. I figured it would be a good test for two weeks at my parents and using it has my only web connection. (Used the iPad for anything the CR48 was unsuited to)
The software is cool. Neat, unecumbered and easy to use. Those are all the good things. The fact your data lives on the cloud means the times I accidently trashed it I could simply wipe and restart, within 10 minutes I was up and running. Guest accounts are awesome, I HATE that with the iPad if someone wants to play with it they have access to my email and browser. ChromeOS really leads the way here with how guesting is done and I hope other systems take notice. The fact everything is encrypted so if someone stole my laptop it would be hard for them to get any personal data. The battery also seems to give exceptional life.
If you do not have internet connection it is useless. That fact right there trumps all other issues. Sure some of the HTML5 apps support some form of offline storage but its nuetered, doesn’t feel right or is downright clunky. There are no native apps, nor are there any good media applications installed. The laptop brimming with power becomes something you close, put in the corner and wait for the internet to come back on because in rural KY verizon’s coverage just isn’t enough. Meanwhile the iPad is playing movies, music and games.
Yep this falls under bad….but what?! WHY?! It is chrome, and chrome is excellent. I use it on every system I can put it on. I love the design and minimal features. The fact it just seems to fly. But on the CR48 chrome lags. Here is a simple test. 1. Open a bunch of tabs 2. Before they have stopped loading try to scroll on the one your on. On my system it is so laggy or choppy has to be useless. Sometimes it doesn’t even respond until the others have finally loaded. My workflow is to open a bunch of tabs with ctl click and then sort them out later. This lag totally kills my workflow. The dirty little secret is I loaded Ubuntu on the CR48, installed chrome and am typing this while SSHing into my OSX for emacs, listening to music and chatting on facebook with a bunch of tabs open while researching Markdown script. I noticed very little lag, things seemed to keep moving at a decent pace and the little CR48 seems to handle ubuntu pretty well with all the weight. Now why can it not handle just chrome as well, this question eludes me.
Whenever the remoting feature comes into play this may change significantly. Currently at work I do .Net and Java(Android) work and at my desk is a big decked out dell desktop. When I am in another office I want to just RDP to the dell and do any work remotely. Conversly I have RDP and VNC on my Windows and OSX boxes at work, so whenever I want to connect to them I want that power. With the Ubuntu installation I can no problem. With ChromeOS, at this moment I cannot.
Part of this goes against the very nature of ChromeOS. But ChromeOS needs native applications, of at least some sort. Let them be connected to the cloud and keep only a subset of data on the device. And make them run in full screen or with the small dialogs at the bottom. Sandbox them in there own DMZ if you must, but ChromeOS needs native applications in the worst way. Steal the base libraries from those Android fellas, along with the basic ideas of the layours but make the whole package keyboard and mouse friendly. Then if you setup a new device you just get the whole shebang of installed applications along with all the assorted chrome apps and extensions.
For example a friend came over, needed to checked email, browsed net, facebooked and paid some bills. Then wanted to watch netflix while I finished up on the computer. I told them they couldn’t, then asked if there were any movies, again I said there were not. At this time she reached for the iPad and used it the rest of the day. Users expect a certain amount of functionality built it.
This is the best “lowend” laptop I have ever used. As far as look and feel it is above even the plastic macbook. This is what a small cheap laptop should be. Not gaudy, 16GB is enough to be usable if it is not your main computer. Processor is decent and 2GB of memory is enough for general usage. The feel of the hardware is the greatest part. When you run your hands over the rubbery surface and the chiclet keys. The screen while not superb is adequate enough. Most importantly it is not guady or out of place. No huge decals saying Intel/Windows/Nvidia/Whatever insider, nor any extra openings or ports. The touchpad is above most non-apple machines and at the price point I assume the this reaches it is great.
Some problems do occur, the VGA port is an unforgivable sin. This is 2010 and DVI should be pretty standard around the land. There is an annoying seem near the front and around the battery where things do not quite meet up. Probably fine for the price point they are trying to hit, but it would have added just a bit of extra polish. Likewise the touchpad is nice but not quite as silky smooth as the macbooks in either feel or actual function.
The iPad is my favorite device I have bought within the past few years. At first I didn’t think it was useful, but after 30 minutes in the apple store I realized that I had to have one. After a few months it replaced my MacbookPro as my mobile computer.
At the heart of the matter the ChromeOS is a better web browser than the iPad, in regards to almost any other functionality the iPad wins.
This is all that really needs to be said here, there are specific applications for almost every imaginable purpose on the iPad, and each one of these is better focused at one task than the chrome generally is.
Here it is a bit closer since some notebooks are crap, and the hardware of ChromeOS just feels so right so it wins in look and feel. I hate netbooks and personally might use ChromeOS over one, but I cannot disregard they are more functional at this time then ChromeOS. That being said I would prefer the ChromeOS over Netbooks since to me Netbooks almost seem disposable, something you use when you value price and lightness over any other attribute. In this case I beleive ChromeOS might be more interesting, perhaps not more powerful. But at least more interestig.
In this case I am talking about the 13-15” Windows/Apple laptop. The problem is that the ChromeOS does not replace this device, given the choice of having a desktop or laptop, most people opt for the laptop. In that case you need the laptop to server as the base, and the ChromeOS loses much of it’s luster. As far as functionality the laptop wins hands down, the ChromeOS brings some interesting concepts but a well tuned Apple laptop overcomes several of these limitations and Windows 7 is a pretty decent OS.
I do not know how to distill it any smaller. It is neat, and it has some promise but I do not think it has promise to the average consumer that Android did, or that iOS has. Why am I comparing all this effort to Android? Simply because Google has limited resources and I am sure there are some truly great UI experts and guys who could be applying their efforts to Android. Are traditional desktops going to the way of the dodo? No.
On the other hand they are not an emerging market. There are not vast new fortunes to be made no matter how much google will try to push it. No non-geek was even remotely interested in the laptop, the iPad or regular computers were the go to box in my household. The device is a slave to another computer.
My advice would be to take what you can out of the project and focus on making Android excellent. I work in Android daily and there are tons of places where money should be spent polishing or fixing up things. I am an Apple man myself, but I would switch to Android if there was a better choice.
Sidenote: I wrote most of this article on the CR48 dual booting into Ubuntu, and the experience was great. The hardware does really feel good.
MattD
The Beginning
Once upon a time when the world was young and the first batch of Cr48s were sent out and the tracker was alive I noticed one being sent to my small town. I watched that singular package has it made it’s way from parts unknown to my town and then eagerly came up with an excuse to stay home from work for a few hours hoping it would land on my doorstep. At one point I noticed it had been delivered but alas not to my doorstep. I became despondent and wrote it off forever lamenting I would not be the alpha geek and have the first beta of the chrome os. Twas a terrible time that is only dimly recorded.
Fast forward a week and my roommate told me I had a package at the house. Not remembering any last minute Christmas gift when I opened it I saw the unique packaging and knew that good times were a coming. A quick login of the my google account a few minutes to update and boom I was browsing the web in a chrome window. In a nutshell that is what this is and right now all that is offered, Chrome browser with an attached keyboard.
More Later
I was listening to the Talk Show a few weeks ago and one of their sponsors was SquareSpace and since I love the show and want to support them I generally check out the sponsors to see if anything interesting catches my eye.
Now for some time I have been struggling with some sort of blogging platform. I have played with everything from nanoc to wordpress, but none of them really fit my fancy. Nanoc was cool but I have no skill when it comes to graphical design so my website could be generated and be really smooth but it still looked terrible. Then Wordpress never quite fit the bill either, I didn’t want to maintain everything it required.
That brings me to Squarespace which has some gorgeous themes and simple to use and for $10 a month more than adequate. I figured it had a gallery and some other options so I could consilidate my smugmug account, blog and other services under one roof. The first roadblock I hit was the lack of any ftp for bulk upload or just storing of files. Instead you have to place your files in a zip file and upload them, ensuring that it does not go over the limit. This annoyed me but I figured I could get around it. The second part was setting up a photo gallery, playing aroudn with it I could get these wonderful lightbox style gallery, but if I wanted more than one gallery you had to click on the gallery then a single picture then you got the good looking gallery. I could find no way to force it into that mode and contacted their support with little success.
That being said it is a great service if you need something extremely simple, the posting interface was intuitive and simple. I think it is one of the best web 2.0 interfaces I have ever had the pleasure of using. Unfortunatly the drawbacks outweighed the benefits. So my current approach is to host my blog here, pictures at smugmug and have www.ppog.org to be the landing pad of all the sections.
I eventually turned away from this service since I needed something with a little more control and something with FTP where I can upload some custom pages. What I really needed was some sort of blogging platform. I looked at blogger, posterous and tumblr. Obviously I eventually chose tumblr, I used both posterous and tumblr for a bit but tumblr just seemed a bit better plus the layout options I really liked. It is a service I would even pay for. So in hindsight SquareSpace is an awesome service but for most people they can go through a blogging service and have just as good usage, after all most people don’t need super uptime.
KeyRemap4Macbook is an awesome program. Just go ahead and download it, if you want fine grained control over your keyboard. The only thing I haven’t been able to do is use it to switch my iMac 27” between external and internal display.
Through the uber simple Keyboard preference I have my useless CAPS LOCK key set to COMMAND key, this works in almost every program except when I am in terminal in which I am using alpine and emacs, both of these make heavy use of the control key and it is a pain to use my pinky. So after fooling with it for a few hours one day I heard about KeyRemap4Macbook which contrary to the name works on any mac. The documentation is a bit of a pain but I managed to make it through it using the examples file. The one thing you must do is restart or you will not even have a private.xml to edit.
This is my little control that is used to set the COMMAND_L key to CONTROL_L ONLY and make terminal now extremely useful instead of hurting my pinky figure. I named it Capslock as control since that is the physical keyname and capslock is command as specified in the stock OSX keyboard preferences.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<item>
<name>Terminal Uses CapsLock as Control</name>
<appendix></appendix>
<identifier>remap.capslock_ctrl</identifier>
<only>TERMINAL</only>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::COMMAND_L,KeyCode::CONTROL_L</autogen>
</item>
<item>
<name>Switch Monitors</name>
<identifier>remap.switchmonitor</identifier>
</item>
</root>
This could be part of an ongoing series about emacs and my thoughts, it is very unstructured and might be rambling
Are you a programmer? Do you use some sort of all purpose utility text editor? If you answered yes and then replied with Notepad or Visual Studio or XCode then you should take another look. I once upon a time used Notepad2 or Textmate depending on platform as my general use text editor. Both are excellent text editors but I found a need for one that could run in a console and for one that was cross platform without a lot of hassle. Two stalwarts stood out among the crowd, two venerable old men in the land of text editors, vi/vim and emacs. I chose emacs for probably silly reasons but once down the road it stuck.
The first time you pick up emacs for whatever platform (and it is available for all platforms), it will be an alien experience. The VERY first thing you need to do is remap your caps lock to Control key, trust me on this. Sharpkeys (Windows) and Remap4Macbook (OSX) are your friends. The first thing you need to understand is almost all commands start with either control or meta (alt), c-x c-s saves, c-x c-f opens a file and esc esc leaves the minibar at the bottom. This is all I knew at the beginning and it was terrible, after a few days I put it away and went back to my environments.
Time passed and I read more and great developers all seemed to use vi or emacs, it also seemed pertinent that a text editor decades old would still be good decades from now. Plus the UI is simplicity in itself and emacs in particular can be a reader, calendar, organizer and directory manager all in one. I read all this and knew I had to try it, so I forced myself into it and it was painful. Be aware that this is painful and you must go through hell to get to something awesome. Google is your friend on when trying to do something with emacs, I still have the cheat sheet and my .emacs file is mostly stolen from other posts.
Ultimately the thing that made me switch was org mode and more on that later, but once I spent a few months on it I realized my fingers could fly while doing things and macros were almost unthinking in doing some quick code cleanup. While writing python code it worked extremely well and things seemed to flow out of my fingers onto the keyboard.
More Later
Today I weigh 310
The day before my two weeks of vacation started I got an odd package in the mail. The mighty CR48 notebook, (or well not so mighty) I would use it throughout the vacation as my only large gadget even forgoing the iPad for most uses. So far not bad, excellent web surfer. I have a larger detailed post that I hope to put up soon.
Been using tumblr as my springboard for the moment. The ease of choosing themes and just getting things to work is pretty nice. Though whenever tumblr went down that did sort of suck. So far it is a service I would pay for, right now my files are hosted on dreamhost for just general usage and ftp dumping ground. I am not a CSS or html oriented person so this seems to fit my usage perfectly.
I can use dreamhost to dump all my files and things I don’t want to keep on tumblr. At some point I may make a little python crawler to crawl my tumblr posts and put them on PPOG so that if tumblr goes down I can always show the posts along with my resume and a handful of other little tidbits. I can only hope at some point some really nice OSX editors pop up but for now a mixture of Mars Edit and the web will have to work. I tried a few of the AIR clients but none of them caught my eye or seemed to offer much.
A few years ago I got a Macbook Pro 15” and used a Swiss Backpack that worked well but just never had any glamour or adventure to it. So I read a particular Gadgeteer review and I was hooked. Part of my screamed at spending such an amount on a Saddleback bag, so I spent much time debating and as always when I wanted something that was expensive I filed it away and told myself if I wanted it in a few months then I can get it. That is my own personal concession to impulse buying. Most of the time it works pretty well and often things pass after I have wanted them. So then I decided I wanted one. I didn’t want to pay retail and they appeared on eBay with some regularity.
I hunted and tried to snipe until I found one for 380ish that was in perfect condition, a large in this case. I bought it and eagerly awaited having a very nice, spartan, cool bag. I carried it every day to and from work for years, having a Macbook Pro 15”, charger, with various other small extras. Overtime it evolved into a Macbook 13” and thenfinally what you see here, iPad, Skullcandy Aviators and a Moleskine in the back.
Now that I have given you some history. Now time for the review.
Granted this are somewhat fuzzy since I have had the bag for several years. I remember being entranced by it, the mythos the color and the indestructibility of the bag. This leather was think, think of the thickest leather you can and then double that. The stitching is superb, heavy and thick and after several years of daily usage I can see no wearing. The clips are heavy duty and their are no zippers to wear out.
What can you easily put it in and how many nooks and crannies does it have? It is a pretty simply bag, one large compartment in the back, one large on int the front with two small pouches that I generally stick my iPad charger in and in the other any other small cords I need. Two small sleeves on the inside, two small sleeves on the outside I rarely use, and then in the large back pocket a hidden compartment I have never used. Finally there is pocket on the back you could put a magazine or notebook in. Guess what I put in there?
Compared to the Swiss backpack I had the saddleback is not as efficient. I tend to carry less with the saddleback since it is harder to dig into the bottom to find anything lose. On the flip side this forces me to carry only the essentials. On the flip side I have found I can cram two days clothes in the bag, granted it is almost busting at the seems but is handy when I only want to pack one bag.
To be honest it is minimal, the leather will almost never let anything pierce the leather and the seams where the leather is sewn together gives it quite a bit of structure. I generally left my laptops bare but my iPad gets wrapped up in the excellent STM case. Again it falls short of the older Swiss backpack I had. That backpack had a good layer of padding that wrapped the laptop. That being said I have tossed the bag into the back of the car and on the floor with nary a problem.
Perhaps in some distant future mutants in the post apocalyptic Fallout will be using the bag to store their fresh water and ammo.
If I look back upon it the Swiss backpack I had outclassed it in almost every category, its a 1/3 of the price, provides better protection, you can put more into the backpack and is more comfortable to wear as a backpack. You can wear the Saddleback as a backpack but I only did so once. That being said I would take the Saddleback every time, it looks better, gives a sense of adventure, people comment about it, and it just plain does not look like a laptop bag.
