Mini-vacation

I have been taking a mini-vacation from most computer things due to the end of the school year so I haven't had much more to report on the Chrome laptop.

Trackpad on the Chrome 48

A lot of people have been talking about the trackpad on the Chrome 48, and how it is not meeting their expectations from their free laptop. I agree, it's not as nice as a Macbook, but I am learning a few things about it.

• You don't want to use tap-to-click. Just like with many cheap trackpads, it gives you a frustrating mixture of not listening to you when you tap it and moving your caret when you're typing. Given that this is the cheapest laptop I've ever bought, I can deal with turning off tap-to-click.
• Two-finger scrolling is frustrating if you don't know how to do it on this laptop. One way is to keep your fingers together. I've found that separating your fingers while scrolling makes it think it should go up at the end of a down scroll. The other option is to keep one finger in place while you scroll with the other. This may be the best way to do it.
• Right-clicking is a pain. Chrome gives you the option of holding down the alt key while you click to make a right click, and for some people, this will probably be the best thing for them.

I don't own a Macbook so I'm not used to all the fancy gestures people can use on it. I do know that it's a lot better than very cheap trackpads that don't do multitouch gestures at all. I'm one of those people who wonders why no one puts a TrackPoint pointer on computers anymore.

Arrival of the Chrome 48

Google has been sending 12in Atom-powered notebook computers out to people who simply filled in a form on their website. How cool is that? It seems pretty crazy, but all of the people who filled in the form agreed to use the computer as their primary computer as much as they could. They also agreed to tell Google about the issues that came up as they used it. Now, who says Google Hates Christmas?

I thought, this sounds like a good opportunity for a vet student. Vet students as a whole have become very computer-savvy and well connected. The number of iPhones and netbooks in my class is huge. Unfortunately, all those netbooks primarily run windows, because that is the only way to stay compatible with all of the software that people need.

What software do vet students use? As you might expect, they use PDF reader/editors, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, web browsers and lots of Google docs. Our school distributes notes and assignments using a customized version of Blackboard's Vista called eLearning Commons, which is essentially the same as WebCT. It's, without doubt, the worst software of its kind, and it's very netbook unfriendly.

Perhaps Google is interested in the issues that their web-oriented OS would have in our environment. If web-based tools could work with eLearning Commons, enabling us to work from anywhere, then vet students could be early adopters of these new OSes.

Al little about my background: I have a mac desktop and a netbook that runs Jolicloud. Jolicloud is a modified form of Linux for netbooks. It combines the Chromium browser with an interface that doesn't use much screen real estate so that you can get the maximum out of your web apps. Apps for Jolicloud are installed from a central location and are really nothing more than the normal web app maximized to full screen without any of the browser bits like tabs or menus. Underneath that, is Linux, and I often drop down to Linux to play around or run Emacs.

My initial impression of ChromeOS is that it is trying to do something similar to Jolicloud, but in an even more restrictive manner. This computer has very little software outside of the Chrome browser. Unless you put it into "developer mode", which I don't intend to do, you can only natively run software that has been signed by Google. Everything else is supposed to be installed through Chrome, as an App or an Extension. I'm hoping that I'll find an enjoyable, low-annoyance computing experience. We'll see over the next few months how that pans out, both as I use the system and as Google upgrades it.