7 ms·

Using the Google Cr-48 for Coding

125 points by adamhowell 16y ago

nagnatron 16y ago
After seeing those large ALT and CTRL keys, looking down on my Thinkpad's keyboard and seeing FN|CTRL|WIN|ALT makes me sad.
CWIZO 16y ago
Keep in mind, while reading this, that the Cr-48 is a beta product of sorts. So the mentioned hardware faults will most likely be fixed when this thing actually ships. Somewhat unrelated: Right now my ideal laptop would be: Take a 13″ Macbook Pro, replace the HD with an SSD, replace the DVD drive with more battery, add 3G. I couldn't agree more, that really would be a perfect laptop.
- jasonjei 16y ago
  I'm extremely happy with my 13" MacBook Air and its 7 hour battery life. Chances are, I'll be tired of looking at my laptop before I'll encounter a situation where I run out of juice, and I have my iPad to tether, even though not technically allowed...
  - pmjordan 16y ago
    There's a Trekstor Portable 3G/HSPA Wifi router (a Rebranded Huawei E5) on its way to me right now. Lack of built-in 3G in the Macbook Air is a little annoying - I'd prefer it over the SD card slot - but this little router should do the trick. Dragging an iPad around together with an Air just for the 3G seems a little over the top. :-) An iPhone 3GS or 4 with bluetooth tethering would be OK I suppose; my 3G's modem is annoyingly slow (384kbit/s) due to lack os HSPA support.
- glhaynes 16y ago
  Sounds like a 13" Air with 3G. I agree, too — would be a super sweet machine. I'd like to see them offer 3G on the 11" Air, too!
- tbob22 16y ago
  Sony Vaio Z, well other than the battery part. Oh yeah, 1920x1080 on a 13". :-)
Groxx 16y ago
Basic summary: Respectable battery life, a poor terminal, and an infuriating trackpad. And John Resig is spoiled from owning a Mac. Battery life is good to hear, terminal strikes me as "fail" (seriously. Developer mode. It should be as developer-friendly as possible, no? That means a good terminal application.), trackpad could be fixed through software, and who isn't (who has one)? [edit: correction: there's a non-developer-mode terminal, which is this one. Developer mode has SSH key abilities & others] Not too surprising, given that this is an early-release test. But in that way it's similar to many other Google products; first version is crap but interesting enough to use, and in time (if not dropped) it tends to take over everything because it gets better and better. It seems to me this might take off whenever they put out offline versions of GMail and Docs. Until then, it's of limited (though interesting) use and most definitely not for everyone.
- jeresig 16y ago
  I've since been able to flip over into developer mode (you have to toggle a physical switch to enable it). It gives you a proper shell (which allows you to install an SSH key) but beyond that there doesn't seem to be much else that you can do (it's not obvious to me how you would install a package or compile code).
  - Groxx 16y ago
    Good to know, SSH keys are essential to a lot of people. Seems strange that the "normal" terminal doesn't support them, though... Thanks for the write-up! I found it useful :) edit: a thought: mind trying `compgen -abc` at the terminal? Idea came from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/948008/linux-command-to-list-all-available-commands-and-aliases http://stackoverflow.com/questions/948008/linux-command-to-l...
    - mbreese 16y ago
      I'm guessing that the lack of proper ssh key support is part of the desire to have nothing permanent on the device. Since one of the security aspects is to make it so that if you lose the machine, you have no risk of compromising your information. Having your private key stored on the machine kind of defeats that purpose. That being said: when I was playing with dev builds on my netbook last year, the first thing I did was put my private key on it.
wccrawford 16y ago
Wow. Lack of SSH niceties like keys must be painful.
ukdm 16y ago
Useful comment posted from Chrome team member Jen: I’m a Chrome team member and saw this going around Twitter. Just wanted to say, you can right-click on the Cr-48 by tapping with two fingers (or holding Alt and single clicking). You can also flip the developer mode switch under the device and get full access to a shell: http://www.chromium.org/poking-around-your-chrome-os-device http://www.chromium.org/poking-around-your-chrome-os-device hope this resolves some of the comments!
- jlees 16y ago
  That was me. Happy to answer further questions here, though I don't want to turn HN into Reddit. (No, I'm afraid I don't know when or if you're going to get one.)
  - lwhi 16y ago
    Is the trial likely to extend to other countries?
    - jlees 16y ago
      The devices we have right now will all be given out to US pilots.
      - lwhi 16y ago
        (* applies for citizenship / enrols in flight-training programme)
  - RexRollman 16y ago
    Does Chrome OS use X11 at all? If so, is there a window manager or is Chrome itself serving that function?
    - jlees 16y ago
      There is a window manager. You can dig into the code via chromium.org if you want to understand the details :)
webXL 16y ago
Still waiting for mine. I knew I should have used John Resig as my alias! Too bad about the terminal and *nix tools. I guess I'll have to use something like Cloud9 IDE to code. I'm really looking forward to the free 3g, though. That and the old black macbook feel.
stcredzero 16y ago
Take a 13″ Macbook Pro, replace the HD with an SSD, replace the DVD drive with more battery, add 3G. I would use that laptop until the end of time. I just replaced the HD on my 13" Macbook with an SSD, but I haven't seen anything about replacing the DVD with a battery. I do have an external laptop battery with a home made magsafe connector and a portable 4G hotspot. I suspect that this setup is only going to last about a year or so longer, though.
- icegreentea 16y ago
  You cannot replace the optical with battery on MBPs. I know older Thinkpads had that ability, but I haven't checked any of the new ones. Regardless, Lenovo seems to be dropping all the funky/awesome Thinkpad accessories from their site.
  - shimon 16y ago
    You can still do this with many of the newest Thinkpads. They call it the "Ultrabay". Example: http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:item.detail?GroupID=38&Code=57Y4536&current-category-id=4364BD0F20B94413B5AD6E684D2848E9&&hide_menu_area=yes http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...
  - wazoox 16y ago
    You could replace the floppy drive with a second battery pack on the PowerBook 5x0, in 1994. OK, I know this is useless trivia but I still have one :)
brown9-2 16y ago
Is Google re-selling the 3G service from another carrier? Didn't realize they were getting into the wireless provider business with this.
- jlees 16y ago
  The 3G is provided by Verizon on this device.
sayrer 16y ago
This seems like what to expect at this stage. Something to dismiss as a toy because you can't create anything serious on it... yet. There has to be a reason Google is bundling Flash on this thing, and I bet the reason is not that Google thinks Flash is so awesome. That has to be the first part of a trade with Adobe. I guess we'll find out how photoshop.com with NaCL plugins works out. :)
- kj12345 16y ago
  Pitted against Chrome, Flash supports webcams, microphones, cross-domain requests, DRM on video/audio, and a certain amount of multithreading through Pixel Bender. Plus (and this is huge) a designer-friendly content creation tool. HTML5 is gaining fast, but there are still some legitimate advantages for Flash.
  - Sephr 16y ago
    HTML5 has every one of those features (DRM not so much, though it's possible with binary XHR Blob buffers, but there's no point to do that as users could easily steal video data from the decoded output canvas). Webcams and microphones can be accessed via the HTML5 <device> API, cross-domain requests can be done with HTTP Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), which is arguably much nicer than Flash's cross-origin policy XML file solution, and multithreading can be done with web workers.
    - kj12345 16y ago
      Cool, didn't know CORS was implemented so widely, and its true about WebWorkers. But Chrome doesn't support <device> yet, or DRM. (I only mention DRM since the Youtube team says its one reason they can't fully move off Flash).
      - Sephr 16y ago
        I thought the only reason YouTube hasn't isn't fully supporting HTML5 was ads. Afaik, YouTube doesn't use any DRM whatsoever.
Timothee 16y ago
"The other day I saw the announcement for the new Chrome OS test laptop and decided to sign up on the off-chance that I might be able to snag one." I would think that someone as high profile as John Resig could get one pretty easily. (actually he did! I mean without filling out the same form as "normal" people) Maybe it shows that he's too humble to ask for one directly...
junkbit 16y ago
If you run "Shell In A Box" on the server you can browse to a full bash prompt in a browser tab. It even has Tab-completion and works with ncurses apps too. You just run a tiny daemon and then connect to it such as https://192.168.1.1:4200 https://192.168.1.1:4200 http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/ http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/
- crabman 16y ago
  172.16.1.199:22
poet 16y ago
The other day I saw the announcement for the new Chrome OS test laptop and decided to sign up on the off-chance that I might be able to snag one.... Surprisingly the laptop arrived this morning and I’ve been having fun putting it through its paces. Oh stop being humble. :P I don't think it's surprising in the least that the creator of JQuery was able to snag a Cr-48. ;)
- shawndumas 16y ago
  Nor is it inappropriate.
rwhitman 16y ago
As someone who spends a lot of time doing UI dev work, I need to open up photoshop and cut up PSDs into CSS quite a bit.. The ability to run a terminal and local PHP or Django are also biggies, but other than that I don't need much of an OS. Everything else I use on a day to day basis is cloud based anyhow Eagerly awaiting the day I can break free of the desktop os for good
RexRollman 16y ago
Although I appreciate Google's efforts to provide it, I am NOT a fan of Flash. Is the a way to turn it off in Chrome OS?
- arhughes 16y ago
  I believe you can disable it in about:plugins
  - RexRollman 16y ago
    Thanks!
- patrickaljord 16y ago
  Same as in chrome, just go to chrome://plugins
mian2zi3 16y ago
When the first Cr-48 reviews popped up, I had exactly this question: "What kind of setup would you want for development?" (Or maybe writing papers in TeX.) ymacs seems like a good start for a web-based editor, but it is useless without filesystem support (C-x C-f directly to Dropbox?) Without ssh'ing into a home box somewhere, I'm not sure what the cloud-based compile/execute/debug development model is supposed to be. Any other ideas what development should look like in the idea cloud-based world?
Raphael 16y ago
I wanted to quickly crunch some numbers and went looking for a calculator. Surprisingly there wasn’t one in the store. I ended up having to use the JavaScript console to do the calculations – which, I suspect, is not what Google expects most users to do. But Google Search is a calculator!
- zandor 16y ago
  And Wolfram Alpha.
trickjarrett 16y ago
I love the idea of mapping caps lock to ctrl + t to make it a new tab button my normal boring laptop. I'm currently looking for an app which will allow that, or a Chrome extension which allows this - anyone have an idea?
- Huppie 16y ago
  On windows you could use Autohotkey to do just that. I'm about to do that just now ;-)
nikster 16y ago
Does Eclipse run on Chrome? No Eclipse, no coding...
al_james 16y ago
" I’d love to be able to have access to a shell and the ability to install vim + screen + git + a web server" I can't help thinking thats beside the point and exactly what google are not designing this for.
- pyre 16y ago
  I think that point is that, like with the iPhone, people want the ability to 'flip a switch' to be able to go beyond the 'canned' experience. Apple wants to force you to only stay within the canned experience, but I would expect a little more from Google. Sure it's not what they are designing it for, but I don't necessarily think that people are expecting support for these actions from Google.
spektom 16y ago
How do you verify that your code behaves correctly in different browsers when developing in JavaScript on Chrome OS?
- modality 16y ago
  Unit tests! :)
bitwize 16y ago
tl;dr i want a macbook air and this isn't it

125 points by adamhowell 16y ago

After seeing those large ALT and CTRL keys, looking down on my Thinkpad's keyboard and seeing FN|CTRL|WIN|ALT makes me sad.

CWIZO 16y ago

Keep in mind, while reading this, that the Cr-48 is a beta product of sorts. So the mentioned hardware faults will most likely be fixed when this thing actually ships. Somewhat unrelated: Right now my ideal laptop would be: Take a 13″ Macbook Pro, replace the HD with an SSD, replace the DVD drive with more battery, add 3G. I couldn't agree more, that really would be a perfect laptop.

jasonjei 16y ago
I'm extremely happy with my 13" MacBook Air and its 7 hour battery life. Chances are, I'll be tired of looking at my laptop before I'll encounter a situation where I run out of juice, and I have my iPad to tether, even though not technically allowed...
- pmjordan 16y ago
  There's a Trekstor Portable 3G/HSPA Wifi router (a Rebranded Huawei E5) on its way to me right now. Lack of built-in 3G in the Macbook Air is a little annoying - I'd prefer it over the SD card slot - but this little router should do the trick. Dragging an iPad around together with an Air just for the 3G seems a little over the top. :-) An iPhone 3GS or 4 with bluetooth tethering would be OK I suppose; my 3G's modem is annoyingly slow (384kbit/s) due to lack os HSPA support.
glhaynes 16y ago
Sounds like a 13" Air with 3G. I agree, too — would be a super sweet machine. I'd like to see them offer 3G on the 11" Air, too!
tbob22 16y ago
Sony Vaio Z, well other than the battery part. Oh yeah, 1920x1080 on a 13". :-)

Groxx 16y ago

Basic summary: Respectable battery life, a poor terminal, and an infuriating trackpad. And John Resig is spoiled from owning a Mac. Battery life is good to hear, terminal strikes me as "fail" (seriously. Developer mode. It should be as developer-friendly as possible, no? That means a good terminal application.), trackpad could be fixed through software, and who isn't (who has one)? [edit: correction: there's a non-developer-mode terminal, which is this one. Developer mode has SSH key abilities & others] Not too surprising, given that this is an early-release test. But in that way it's similar to many other Google products; first version is crap but interesting enough to use, and in time (if not dropped) it tends to take over everything because it gets better and better. It seems to me this might take off whenever they put out offline versions of GMail and Docs. Until then, it's of limited (though interesting) use and most definitely not for everyone.

jeresig 16y ago
I've since been able to flip over into developer mode (you have to toggle a physical switch to enable it). It gives you a proper shell (which allows you to install an SSH key) but beyond that there doesn't seem to be much else that you can do (it's not obvious to me how you would install a package or compile code).
- Groxx 16y ago
  Good to know, SSH keys are essential to a lot of people. Seems strange that the "normal" terminal doesn't support them, though... Thanks for the write-up! I found it useful :) edit: a thought: mind trying `compgen -abc` at the terminal? Idea came from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/948008/linux-command-to-list-all-available-commands-and-aliases http://stackoverflow.com/questions/948008/linux-command-to-l...
  - mbreese 16y ago
    I'm guessing that the lack of proper ssh key support is part of the desire to have nothing permanent on the device. Since one of the security aspects is to make it so that if you lose the machine, you have no risk of compromising your information. Having your private key stored on the machine kind of defeats that purpose. That being said: when I was playing with dev builds on my netbook last year, the first thing I did was put my private key on it.

wccrawford 16y ago

Wow. Lack of SSH niceties like keys must be painful.

ukdm 16y ago

Useful comment posted from Chrome team member Jen: I’m a Chrome team member and saw this going around Twitter. Just wanted to say, you can right-click on the Cr-48 by tapping with two fingers (or holding Alt and single clicking). You can also flip the developer mode switch under the device and get full access to a shell: http://www.chromium.org/poking-around-your-chrome-os-device http://www.chromium.org/poking-around-your-chrome-os-device hope this resolves some of the comments!

jlees 16y ago
That was me. Happy to answer further questions here, though I don't want to turn HN into Reddit. (No, I'm afraid I don't know when or if you're going to get one.)
- lwhi 16y ago
  Is the trial likely to extend to other countries?
  - jlees 16y ago
    The devices we have right now will all be given out to US pilots.
    - lwhi 16y ago
      (* applies for citizenship / enrols in flight-training programme)
- RexRollman 16y ago
  Does Chrome OS use X11 at all? If so, is there a window manager or is Chrome itself serving that function?
  - jlees 16y ago
    There is a window manager. You can dig into the code via chromium.org if you want to understand the details :)

webXL 16y ago

Still waiting for mine. I knew I should have used John Resig as my alias! Too bad about the terminal and *nix tools. I guess I'll have to use something like Cloud9 IDE to code. I'm really looking forward to the free 3g, though. That and the old black macbook feel.

stcredzero 16y ago

Take a 13″ Macbook Pro, replace the HD with an SSD, replace the DVD drive with more battery, add 3G. I would use that laptop until the end of time. I just replaced the HD on my 13" Macbook with an SSD, but I haven't seen anything about replacing the DVD with a battery. I do have an external laptop battery with a home made magsafe connector and a portable 4G hotspot. I suspect that this setup is only going to last about a year or so longer, though.

icegreentea 16y ago
You cannot replace the optical with battery on MBPs. I know older Thinkpads had that ability, but I haven't checked any of the new ones. Regardless, Lenovo seems to be dropping all the funky/awesome Thinkpad accessories from their site.
- shimon 16y ago
  You can still do this with many of the newest Thinkpads. They call it the "Ultrabay". Example: http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:item.detail?GroupID=38&Code=57Y4536&current-category-id=4364BD0F20B94413B5AD6E684D2848E9&&hide_menu_area=yes http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...
- wazoox 16y ago
  You could replace the floppy drive with a second battery pack on the PowerBook 5x0, in 1994. OK, I know this is useless trivia but I still have one :)

brown9-2 16y ago

Is Google re-selling the 3G service from another carrier? Didn't realize they were getting into the wireless provider business with this.

jlees 16y ago
The 3G is provided by Verizon on this device.

sayrer 16y ago

This seems like what to expect at this stage. Something to dismiss as a toy because you can't create anything serious on it... yet. There has to be a reason Google is bundling Flash on this thing, and I bet the reason is not that Google thinks Flash is so awesome. That has to be the first part of a trade with Adobe. I guess we'll find out how photoshop.com with NaCL plugins works out. :)

kj12345 16y ago
Pitted against Chrome, Flash supports webcams, microphones, cross-domain requests, DRM on video/audio, and a certain amount of multithreading through Pixel Bender. Plus (and this is huge) a designer-friendly content creation tool. HTML5 is gaining fast, but there are still some legitimate advantages for Flash.
- Sephr 16y ago
  HTML5 has every one of those features (DRM not so much, though it's possible with binary XHR Blob buffers, but there's no point to do that as users could easily steal video data from the decoded output canvas). Webcams and microphones can be accessed via the HTML5 <device> API, cross-domain requests can be done with HTTP Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), which is arguably much nicer than Flash's cross-origin policy XML file solution, and multithreading can be done with web workers.
  - kj12345 16y ago
    Cool, didn't know CORS was implemented so widely, and its true about WebWorkers. But Chrome doesn't support <device> yet, or DRM. (I only mention DRM since the Youtube team says its one reason they can't fully move off Flash).
    - Sephr 16y ago
      I thought the only reason YouTube hasn't isn't fully supporting HTML5 was ads. Afaik, YouTube doesn't use any DRM whatsoever.

Timothee 16y ago

"The other day I saw the announcement for the new Chrome OS test laptop and decided to sign up on the off-chance that I might be able to snag one." I would think that someone as high profile as John Resig could get one pretty easily. (actually he did! I mean without filling out the same form as "normal" people) Maybe it shows that he's too humble to ask for one directly...

junkbit 16y ago

If you run "Shell In A Box" on the server you can browse to a full bash prompt in a browser tab. It even has Tab-completion and works with ncurses apps too. You just run a tiny daemon and then connect to it such as https://192.168.1.1:4200 https://192.168.1.1:4200 http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/ http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/

crabman 16y ago
172.16.1.199:22

poet 16y ago

The other day I saw the announcement for the new Chrome OS test laptop and decided to sign up on the off-chance that I might be able to snag one.... Surprisingly the laptop arrived this morning and I’ve been having fun putting it through its paces. Oh stop being humble. :P I don't think it's surprising in the least that the creator of JQuery was able to snag a Cr-48. ;)

shawndumas 16y ago
Nor is it inappropriate.

rwhitman 16y ago

As someone who spends a lot of time doing UI dev work, I need to open up photoshop and cut up PSDs into CSS quite a bit.. The ability to run a terminal and local PHP or Django are also biggies, but other than that I don't need much of an OS. Everything else I use on a day to day basis is cloud based anyhow Eagerly awaiting the day I can break free of the desktop os for good

RexRollman 16y ago

Although I appreciate Google's efforts to provide it, I am NOT a fan of Flash. Is the a way to turn it off in Chrome OS?

arhughes 16y ago
I believe you can disable it in about:plugins
- RexRollman 16y ago
  Thanks!
patrickaljord 16y ago
Same as in chrome, just go to chrome://plugins

mian2zi3 16y ago

When the first Cr-48 reviews popped up, I had exactly this question: "What kind of setup would you want for development?" (Or maybe writing papers in TeX.) ymacs seems like a good start for a web-based editor, but it is useless without filesystem support (C-x C-f directly to Dropbox?) Without ssh'ing into a home box somewhere, I'm not sure what the cloud-based compile/execute/debug development model is supposed to be. Any other ideas what development should look like in the idea cloud-based world?

Raphael 16y ago

I wanted to quickly crunch some numbers and went looking for a calculator. Surprisingly there wasn’t one in the store. I ended up having to use the JavaScript console to do the calculations – which, I suspect, is not what Google expects most users to do. But Google Search is a calculator!

zandor 16y ago
And Wolfram Alpha.

trickjarrett 16y ago

I love the idea of mapping caps lock to ctrl + t to make it a new tab button my normal boring laptop. I'm currently looking for an app which will allow that, or a Chrome extension which allows this - anyone have an idea?

Huppie 16y ago
On windows you could use Autohotkey to do just that. I'm about to do that just now ;-)

nikster 16y ago

Does Eclipse run on Chrome? No Eclipse, no coding...

al_james 16y ago

" I’d love to be able to have access to a shell and the ability to install vim + screen + git + a web server" I can't help thinking thats beside the point and exactly what google are not designing this for.

pyre 16y ago
I think that point is that, like with the iPhone, people want the ability to 'flip a switch' to be able to go beyond the 'canned' experience. Apple wants to force you to only stay within the canned experience, but I would expect a little more from Google. Sure it's not what they are designing it for, but I don't necessarily think that people are expecting support for these actions from Google.

spektom 16y ago

How do you verify that your code behaves correctly in different browsers when developing in JavaScript on Chrome OS?

modality 16y ago
Unit tests! :)

bitwize 16y ago

tl;dr i want a macbook air and this isn't it