Comments on: Google Chrome OS

By: August Samuel

August Samuel — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:27:56 +0000

here is how u can do it, its the best way

By: Online Tech Tips, Free Software for Everybody

Online Tech Tips, Free Software for Everybody — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:23:07 +0000

Chrome OS on Mac OS X…

Google finally made Chrome OS live about a month ago. The operating system offer cloud computing, mainly for netbooks. In simple words, it is an Internet operating system.
The OS based on Chrome web browser. Every application in Chrome is a web applica…

By: Ian McKellar

Ian McKellar — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:28:27 +0000

@Dave, Yeah, and Apple has done a good job shifting gradually from a desktop ‘digital hub’ model (though the iPod, iPhone and Apple TV are far too tethered for my liking) to the ‘cloud of devices’ model. I mean they don’t seem to be really working on desktop OS features.

Really specialized tools like Live, Reason, Photoshop and Eclipse tend to throw away most of the OS anyway. They work the same on Windows as they do on Mac, and there’s no way browsers would ever expose enough APIs to do a port. On the other hand it should be possible to implement something more along the lines of GarageBand, iPhoto, etc though more limited predictable APIs.

By: A brighter future for mobile applications?

A brighter future for mobile applications? — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:18:01 +0000

[...] the Chrome OS announcement the other day I’ve been thinking more about what a world with rich enough web APIs to support all general [...]

By: Dave Cake

Dave Cake — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:24:02 +0000

I think it is quite interesting how the idea of the Mac as a ‘digital hub’ seemed so prescient in retrospect (introduced pre-iPod, pre-OS X), but is starting to look so old-fashioned – we don’t want a digital hub now, we just want points of access to the digital cloud. The idea of Mac OS X as digital media creation platform still seems strong (I love the Mac as a music creation platform too, Logic and Live etc) but thats a much less mass market concept.

By: Ian McKellar

Ian McKellar — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:30:45 +0000

@Dave, yes of course. If Chrome OS turns out like it could and applications move online more I expect that special purpose operating systems will exist for media creators (MacOS) and developers (Linux desktop), but far fewer people will need to use them. In theory more and more of that stuff could move online, but it’s diminishing returns. I don’t find myself actually recommending MacOS to people who want to edit digital video or do advanced photography – they’re already running it

By: Dave Cake

Dave Cake — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:10:40 +0000

Actually, I find a big difference between the audience I’d recommend Macs for now and the audience I’d recommend Chrome OS for, though there is a big overlap. A strong point of Macs remain that they are good machines for people who want to do creative stuff with media. I find there is less friction creating and transforming music, graphics, video, etc on Macs on average for creative use. Whereas Chrome is for people who want mostly to communicate, mostly using words – which covers a really large number of people, and is a group quite well served by Macs currently, but not quite the same people (no value judgement is implied about either kind of person, obviously).

Linux, of course, remains an excellent platform for people who want to do creative things with code.

By: Ian McKellar

Ian McKellar — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:09:37 +0000

@pvh, You’re of course right. With NativeClient can do fast compute and some more APIs will make at least consumer video editing etc possible.

The bandwidth problem can be solved, you can either store and process the canonical version on the server or on the client and transfer low-res versions between.

As for the free software implications, I think we need to either start taking AGPL3 seriously and using it everywhere or focus really hard on open protocol and open data as a consumer right.

By: pvh

pvh — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:05:23 +0000

Why compile code when you can interpret it on a Heroku instance? Need more performance? Scatter it across a few hundred Erlang interpreters. Why edit locally when you can edit it remotely? The bandwidth requirements for code editing are trivial.

Sure, not all the user-side is quite there yet, but with a few plugins that give the browser more native access to the hardware, you can do a lot. Look at Firefox’s geolocation API, for example, or the Flash webcam/microphone API.

Even considering bandwidth-intensive applications (video and music editing are the first two I can think of off the top of my head) you can always store that data locally and just serve up the application. When you finish, render straight to YouTube, and sync the data to your personal data store while you sleep that night.

It is sadly ironic that if this Linux-derived approach were successful it would be crippling to the open source community. Good luck trying to fork Facebook, or Flickr. I imagine this development would lead to a strong open-data movement. In a future where everything is a web app, who owns my list of Facebook contacts? And whose decision is it if I want to take my photo collection from Flickr and take it elsewhere?

By: Ian McKellar

Ian McKellar — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:26:02 +0000

@Dave, If this works out like it should then I’ll be recommending Chrome OS to all of the people I would recommend a mac to right now. Simple, straight-forward, maintenance free, what else could you want.