Consumption and Production on the Chromebook (Google's CR-48)

Summary: Even in the early stages of Chrome OS development, Google’s newest addition to the Operating System landscape is shaping up to be an interesting venture into the future of digital consumption and production. There are some glaring omissions that could hinder the experience for a casual web surfer and will need to be sorted out before a public box sees the light of day.

As a designer and coder, I couldn’t, in its current state, use the CR-48 as my primary machine. I would be willing to give future iterations a try. Moving away from Desktop apps to Web apps and from local storage to cloud storage wouldn’t be out of the question for me.

Doing right by Google’s Terms of Service

I’ve been living with Google’s CR-48 since it was sent to me three days after the announcement of the pilot program. I’ve done my best to leave it as it was sent it to me. I pondered switching the thing into developer mode but I wanted to do right by Google since they sent it to me just weeks after my laptop died. Thanks to a short holiday break I was able to work solely on this machine.

They gave me a free laptop so I owe it to them to write a review and submit some bug reports.

Measuring Chrome OS’s success

Aside from the “new tab” page and some settings, Chrome OS is a window to the Internet, and that’s about it. If the only criteria for considering Chrome OS as successful is that it can get online, great! It got me online, no problem. It’s a success!


My Chrome Start Page

But I do more than just use the Internet while I’m on the go. As most people do.

How the hell am I going to do X?

As someone who does more than just consume information while on the go, I had a hard time figuring out how to accomplish what I normally do – make some art, code some websites, and theorize on the future of the web. I spent the first week with the CR-48, almost exclusively, seeking out online services that could help me replace my current “installable app” mentality.

It was tough.

Web applications have come a long way pretty quickly, but none of them amount to the powerhouse apps that exist on desktop PCs, with their abundance of unnecessary features. I’m going to imaging that will change quickly if people are willing to start living and working online.

You’re comparing it to what?

I’ve been watching peer reviews of the CR-48 intently and a lot of people have been missing the point, comparing minimally functional hardware and a beta OS to the likes of iPads and Macbooks, when the purpose of this is far different.

The CR-48 is really a netbook, and an inexpensive one and at that, and more the size of a laptop. Almost every review has been about the Hardware and not Chrome OS (with the exception of a few). I’ll mention little of the actual hardware.

The innovations

This box does have a couple of things that most notebooks don’t have right out of the box related to security, like extreme data encryption and verified boot, that could come in handy if someone manages to get a hold of it when you accidentally leave it somewhere.

You really can’t install a thing on this, so no need to worry about those extra measures for virus scanning, malware protection and the like, at least for now.

Get your head out of the clouds

What makes Google’s Chrome OS interesting in its current state, is that it is forcing us to live in the cloud – they’re supporting the move to a digital existence where you can let your computer get eaten by lions and not care, and asking us to leave our data in the hands of online services (which may or may not have a track record of success).

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
Henry David Thoreau

I have always kept my data close by and use cloud services as backups, but I’ve never lived in it. I haven’t had an issue with my data being “out there” but I do take the time to pull down everything to an old school hard drive every once in a while, if they don’t already live locally.

I have a hard time giving up my data so easily, and the only way I believe that I can work in a cloud environment is if I had the ability to easily export my data with the click of a button to a local hard drive. With most of the Google Services I use, the data usually starts from a local drive and uploaded from there (Picasa, some stuff in Docs), but in the case of the other Google services, there is always The Data Liberation Front.

Plenty of people have voiced their concerns or given Cloud Computing praise. Like these nice folks:

Reviewing the internet

There isn’t a lot of information floating around about this box yet, and I’m surprised to see people still saying there’s no way to look at files on the hard drive. So I’m just going to show you how I’ve been able to move from desktop apps to these newfangled Web-apps that everyone seems to be talking about, and point out some things I’ve noticed about Chrome OS, good or bad.

This is more about the landscape of web apps that exist that can help me accomplish my usual digital production than what Chrome OS can do.

Given some more time, interest in web apps, and moving to the cloud, Chrome OS and the people at Google just might be on to something.

Right now, this particular box might be lacking in hardware, and the available online services might not be up-to-par with desktop apps, but the near future doesn’t look too bad.

File storage

I’ve been using SugarSync for sometime now – if you haven’t seen it, it’s an alternative to Dropbox offering 5GB of free storage and some features that Dropbox is just starting to introduce (like selective folder syncing). It has worked like a charm for me for a while now and I’d highly recommend looking into it.

Go try it out using my referral link so I can get as much storage as I can – I’m going to need it.


Playing local files in the Chrome OS Media Player

The first thing I did was pull down some music and files I had sitting on SugarSync just to see what happens on the local file system. There wasn’t much to it, but it does have a built-in media player that worked – with a little digging around I found that you could browse the file system at chrome://filebrowse – but you can uncover more of the Linux folders when uploading files on certain websites – quite strange.

I would like to see some sort of tighter integration with the cloud acting as the file system on this – so it’s not a two-step process to pull from the cloud just to upload it to some other site.

Playing music

SugarSync has a good streaming player that allows you to play music, and create playlists of the music you store. I had no problem listening to a full album over my 3G connection.

There is also an extensions out there for Chrome that allow you to stream music right from Dropbox, and of course there are already countless apps for streaming music that you might prefer.

Being social

This was an easy one to tackle. I love TweetDeck and their new in-browser app. There are too many Twitter web apps to cover and more than enough to choose from.


TweetDeck for Chrome

Brainstorming, wireframing, flow charts

I have been a user of the Google Docs suite since it came out. If you haven’t see the Google Demo Slam: Epic Docs Animation it will give you an idea of what’s possible with Google Docs, and is quite possibly the best 450 page slide show ever.

There is a constant stream of new wireframing, flow charting, and diagramming applications coming to life including Pidoco, Creately, both worth a good look.

If you’re into wireframing, there are some kits that exist out there for Google Docs, like Morton Just’s UI Kit, for a start. Just had to point that out because it came in really handy for me one day.


Morton Just’s UI Kit for Google Docs

Writing

Wordsmithing, of course, is also no problem – you can use Google Docs, Zoho Office or whatever floats your boat. Bloggers rejoice!


Google Docs editor in all its glory

Design

This is probably the aspect of web apps that will take the longest to get up to par with desktop apps, aside from video or audio editing. I have seen masterpieces created in Microsoft Paint, so there has to be something that will work for me. I messed around with Pixlr Editor which was surprisingly robust and probably the service that I will use the most. Aviary offers some image editing apps, but nothing extraordinary.


Working on a piece of art in Pixlr

Coding

A strong online IDE was also really tough to find. I went through a number of online IDE’s but the only two that really stuck out were PHPAnywhere and ShiftEdit – both allow live editing of sites through FTP and a good set of features. Nothing comes near to the usefulness of a desktop app, but there is plenty of potential. I could definitely use either of these services.


ShiftEdit’s Code Editor

To really give it a whirl, I spent several hours using ShiftEdit to create a Canvas Animation and it went pretty smoothly. The only drawback is that I can’t do any cross browser testing.

John Resig has a review from a Coder’s perspective, Google CR-48 Coding, and it is worth a read.

And the rest

There are plenty of other things that I don’t need a laptop to do, like video editing or audio mixing, but there are products that exist out there, you just have to have a little time to explore and be willing to make some compromises.

Here are some places to find some of the coolest new web apps:

So where does Chrome OS fit?

Given the progress being made in the Web app world, we might just be on the verge of being able to work completely online – from writing blogs to rendering 3D animations, if both Google and Developers can continue to push the technology, we might just be using something like this in the near future and cover every aspect of digital production. I am going to assume that’s what Google sees and why there has been such an effort with Chrome OS.

A box like this will never replace a three monitor, quad-core, desktop machine – and that will never be its purpose.

Having a second machine stripped of everything except the web just might work for a lot of people, but I’m not sure it will work for me.

After seeing this promo video for the newest iteration of Android OS, I would much rather be running Android. I almost wonder if Chrome OS even has a future.

Thank you Google, is my contract fulfilled?

Thank you Google, for being both innovative and questionable at times. I will enjoy having the CR-48 around.

I don’t remember the exact details of what I volunteered to do during this pilot program, but I think I have fulfilled my end of the bargain. I have submitted a handful of bug reports, feature requests and now written this review.

I will keep this running as intended for a while, but it looks like it’s going to be too much fun installing a dual-boot with Ubuntu or running Android Gingerbread. I only made it 3 days before I voided the warranty on my Android phone, so I don’t see this being any different.

I’ll see what happens.