Juixe Techknow

Google publicly announced Chrome OS in back in July 2007. They’ve been busy building a lightweight browser-powered and cloud computing-enabled Operating System. Recently in, December 2010 Google announced a test pilot program for a Chrome OS notebook dubbed Google CR-48. On the day of the announcement, some insiders already had the CR-48 in hand but Google also opened up the test pilot program to the general public via a signup form. The signup was targeted to developers, educators, and individuals alike. By way of a Christmas miracle, I was able to land a Google CR-48 and have been using it for days now.

As soon as the details of the Google Chrome Notebook were made available I was immediately in love with the Google CR-48. It’s basically an ultra light weight cloud computing client running a slimmed down web enabled Operating System. The CR-48 is as portable as an iPad but with a full keyboard. The CR-48 has a smart track pad that supports iPad-like touch gestures. The CR-48 is always on, just like an iPad or Mac Air, so there is no boot up time when all you want is just check your email or post a tweet. That said, the CR-48 is not a official product and that is evident by the simple black frame, it’s even without a trace of corporate logo or Intel inside sticker. Because the CR-48 is not a official product, I won’t say much about the industrial design and finish of the hardware other than to say that unlike the iPad, it has a USB port and a SD slot.

Google Chrome CR-48 Notebook

As soon as you open the CR-48 it turned on magically and prompted me to sign in. Unlike the iPhone or iPad, the CR-48 doesn’t require you to connect to a computer before you can use it. After some setup steps, you can sign in and take it for a run. As soon as you log into the device, you will see a Chrome browser taking up the whole screen with a single tab. It does take some time to realize that the CR-48 is a laptop with just one application, a browser. That is all it is, a browser. There is nothing to see, move along, it’s only a browser. Your desktop is your default page as shown in a Chrome browser. It merits repeating, the Chrome CR-48 only has one installed application, a Chrome browser.

As soon as you log into the CR-48 you find a browser in full window mode and if configured correctly with your home’s WiFi, you can start surfing the net. I’ve been using the CR-48 for reading blogs, checking email, liking status updates on Facebook, and accessing the web applications I use on a daily basis. Google does have a Chrome specific Web Store where you can install free and paid applications but I’ve not found anything of interest.

Aside from the technical specification of the Google Chrome CR-48 notebook, what is more interesting for me is that this is the first cloud computing client, a sort of Web 2.0 Thin Client. I am a avid user of Google Docs, GMail, WordPress, and other online services that have a large amount of my data in their respective ‘cloud.’

Realizing that this is a cloud client, privacy issues and data mining concerns immediately become apparent. It is already known that Google saves user searches and that with this and other identifying data they modify search results. It is already known that Google Adsense ads are targeted to the sites you visit. Can you imagine how valuable your browser history and usage statistics is to a company like Google? Google has a large amount of identifying information with from all angles of your browsing experience, from Google Search, Google Adsense, Google Analytics, and now Chrome and it’s Chrome notebook. I can see a future where Google would be giving away Chrome and Android-based devises for free because they can collect so much valuable information and up sell users with highly targeted ads.

The CR-48 is a great little notebook but a machine like that would never replace my laptop. At this time and with it’s current specifications, it can’t handle the hundreds of pictures I am known to take over a weekend, it can’t handle the gigabytes of video I take on a trip, and as great as Google Docs is it’s still not Microsoft Office. I see the CR-48 as a great web surfing machine while TV surfing.

I just caught up for the first time since Christmas with my next door neighbor. They know I “work with computers” so they stopped by to see if I could help them with a small technical issue. One of their kids scored an Apple iPad from Santa but they haven’t been able to play with it. Apple requires you to connect your new iOS device, iPhone and iPad, with a computer and sync with your iTunes account before you can use it. You can’t even write a new text memo, watch videos on YouTube, surf online, send an email, much less purchase, download, and play games and music from the iTunes store before you connect your new iOS device with a computer. For five days now, their new iPad has been the best gift and the worst gift they received this Christmas.

I prefer the iPhone over any of the available Android phones, but the one thing I love about the Google Nexus One is that you don’t even need to plug to play. Just turn it on and you are on your way. Even updates are done Over The Air (OTA) so you don’t ever have to connect your Nexus One to a computer. The whole premise of Cloud Computing is that you don’t have to be shackled to a desktop.

I just had to walk through what my neighbor needed to do to set up their new iPad and you should have seen the confusion and disappointment in the parent’s and kid’s faces, respectively. In a nutshell, they have to download and install iTunes, create an iTunes account, connect the iPad with their computer, and then they can play a song or surf the web.

I can’t believe that Apple can revolutionize the user interface of the iPhone to have one button and yet have a complicated user experience of setting up their new iOS device.

As mobile devices become more and more entrenched and as more mobile devices become available there is a growing number of people that want to quickly develop an idea into an app. Developers of all sorts are picking up Objective-C to develop the next top selling mobile-based and touch enabled app. If you don’t want to learn Objective-C, there are several mobile frameworks to choice.

Rhomobile – A cross-platform mobile app development.
Titanium – A cross-platform native application stack.
MonoTouch – Write iPhone and iPod Touch applications in C# and .NET.
iWebkit – A simple framework to create your own iPhone and iPod Touch webapps.
TapLynx – Rapidly develop iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch Apps without learning Cocoa.
PhoneGap – PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps.
jQTouch – A jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPhone Touch, and other forward-thinking devices.
Cocos2D for iPhone – A framework for building 2D games and graphical applications.

By the lack of features in iTunes, you would think the current version is still under better not version 10.1. As far as consumer applications go, iTunes is pretty polish but it is immediately evident that most of the engineering staff go into the iTunes store and not the management of your digital content. It feels to me that there are a lot of key features missing in iTunes. It might be that I just don’t know some secret incantation of how to do what I want, but I’ve searched online with little success.

Here is a short list of features I wish were available in iTunes.

iTunes should have the ability to activate, and most importantly deactivate, a computer or device from your iTunes account online. I want to log in and see what devices are activated with my account ad deactivate them.

One other feature I require from iTunes is the ability to sort and filter music and other content by the account that purchased it. I have a repository of music bought from several different accounts from different family members or friends. In some cases, I want to deactivate their account and delete their music.

One problem that I’ve frequently encounter is that the album art of music get’s corrupted. Over time I’ve seen that the album art for a song will be of a different artist. I wish I can have a way to tell iTunes to correct or update it’s album art repository.

It’s really hard to find really great iPad apps from the hundreds of thousands of apps available from the Apple iTunes appstore. I’ve bought a few apps that I’ve later regretted. In this post I’ll list the top five iPad apps, other than Twitter apps, that I love using on the iPad. I’m always looking for new apps to try out, if you have any suggestions, please feel free to list them in the comments sections.

Autodesk SketchBook Pro – My go to app for drawing a quick sketch for an idea, logo, or design is the Autodesk SketchBook Pro. It’s easy to use, has a nice selection of different brushes and patterns. One of my favorite features is the mirror, drawing one a line will produce a mirrored image of that line. I also like that the produced images can easily be exported at a high resolution. SketchBook Pro also supports multiple layers. There are few features I would like to add to this app. I’ve used images generated from this app in my Tumblr on many occasions.

Penultimate – Another favorite sketch app is Penultimate. This sketch app is a lot simpler and easier to use. Penultimate only has three pen widths and six colors to choose so I used this for rough sketches for ideas. The look of Penultimate feels like a Molskine notepad. Penultimate allows you to have multiple notebooks, each for a different project. You can export a page as an image or a notebook as a PDF document.

Amazon Kindle – I’ve had a Kindle since it was originally released and I have a lot of notes, highlights, and bookmarks for the Kindle ebooks that I’ve read. Even though I have a Kindle, the most common way I read Kindle books is through my iPad via the Kindle for iPad application.

Adobe PS Express – The Adobe PS Express is my favorite app when it comes to cropping pictures on the iPad. PS Express comes with a few commonly used photo manipulations such as cropping, straightening, rotating, and flipping images. It also has a predefined set of borders and filters to apply on your photos or image files.

Strip Design – Strip Design is a very simple iPhone and iPad app that allows you to create comic strip like panels. You can create a strip of one, two, three, or four panels. In each panel you can drop a different image. You can also add thought balloons and different stickers such as crazy looking mustaches or action effects.

Dragon Dictation – Dragon Dictation helps to transcribe to text what you say. This is really useful to record a thought and have it transcribed to text quickly. Dragon has good recognition, at least it has worked for me. I used Dragon Dictation when I want to jot down a idea quickly, then I emailed me the dictated text for final editing.

It comes as a no surprise to technologist that Google would pull the plug on Google Wave, I just didn’t expect it so soon. I also didn’t expect Google to kill it’s Google Nexus One phone. As a user of Google products, I am always apprehensive to use new Google products because they have a track record of just dropping support for products they deemed unsuccessful with little or no notice. Google has been known to buy products like Jaiku and Dodgeball only to kill them after a year. The other products that I have used and Google has killed include Google Notebook, Google Video, and Google Page Creator. This is one reason I would not use any Google product still in beta, which is most of Google’s products, for mission critical applications. Most of Google’s consumer applications are free, such as Google Docs, Google Mail, and Google Search but only because they provide zero customer support. In fact, you have a better change of finding a Google employee or Product Manager through Twitter than you do through their About Us, Contact Us or corporate website. It’s joke that you can’t even find Google customer support page for any of their products even if you use Google Search.

Google prides themselves in hiring really brilliant engineers, bordering savants and the top 5% of MENSA, and it designs products for users just like them. Basically they design for nerds, and the first response you will ever get when asking a question to a technology focused group is RTFM, and this is how Google treats it’s users. Google expects it’s user to comb through Google Groups, do Google Searches, and ask your colleagues via Google Voice because Google does not see as it’s job to help users with Google products, but to create new products and see what users use, and see how they use it, how much they use it, and how they can learn from users behaviors.

So one is left asking, what product will Google kill next? Orkut? Chrome OS? Google Reader? Google Knol?