ChromeBook

As I mentioned in passing in my last post, I recently bought an Acer 710-2688 ChromeBook from B&H Photo in New York. I was very happy with it, and took it with me - as well as the Samsung Tablet - on holiday to Germany over Christmas. The upshot of this experience is that I bought a second one from B&H for my wife, to replace her Asus netbook as Windows XP "expires".

So, being a programmer, the first thing that you would expect me to do would be to program the little thing. But, ...... there's no interface to the ChromeOS operating system! This kinda makes it a little difficult to program, but people have managed it, so there's a rather neat application called SourceLair that sits out there in the cloud and allows you to practice your programming skills in any of a variety of languages. In fact, this is just running programs from the Acer, not programming the Acer (see alternative IDEs here). To do that you develop Chrome Apps - see the developer docs here for some surprisingly readable documentation about it all.

BTW, for some more info (and more than a few typos!) on the ChromeBook you could look at ChromeBookHQ.

So right now I'm doing all my browsing on mine, am playing with Python, and even looking at remoting in to work using this little 11" monster. In short, this is what the netbook should have been, back in 2007, and maybe would have been, except for Microsoft "persuading" the manufacturers to use Windows XP instead of a Linux variant (which would have been faster, more reliable, and better for all concerned.

That's all for now - keep warm!

TTFN