notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Some Thoughts On Cr-48

Yesterday Google previewed its “pilot program” test notebook, the Cr-48.

Some quick thoughts, mainly on seeing the pictures.

• Crumbs, doesn’t it look like a black 13” MacBook circa 2008?
• A VGA port? Upside: compatibility, no dongles. Downside: huge, analogue
• The mousepad appears to be buttonless, like newish MacBooks
• No function keys
• No caps lock (replaced, naturally, with a Search key)
• Only two meta keys (Ctrl and Alt). No Windows key, but no replacement either
• The cursor keys fill the space, so left/right are bigger than up/down

I’m not sure if I’d use one, but I’m sure people in the office have put their names down for the lottery and if there’s one place in the world where I can pretty much seeing one in the next few months, it’s here. It’ll be interesting to watch.

A short list of Chrome issues (beta 2)

An update on the issues listed in December:

• You can’t invert open behind - on Safari command shift click opens in a new window behind the current one with command click opening in a new window in front/focus, whereas Chrome is hard-wired to do the opposite (and with tabs to boot)
• Tab moves between all link and form elements, not just form elements (Gmail does this on Safari now too. Boo!)
• There are no command key shortcuts to open bookmarks in the toolbar
• The combined text/title/URL completion in the “Omnibox” means you have to go too far into a URL to easily work around the lack of command key shortcuts
• You can’t set a default font size, so sites that honour relative fonts (like delicious, and (in places) Twitter) now have Huge Idiot Typefaces
  • fixed, in Preferences > Under the Hood
• While Chrome sensibly uses the keychain (so, like Camino, it can share usernames and passwords set up in Safari) it doesn’t offer to complete the username part, meaning more typing
  • this seems to be fixed too
• Crashes on pasting a rich text post from Tumblr back into Tumblr
• Crashes on importing my (admittedly huge) Safari history

On the other hand, I am pleased to see that a request for the zoom button to instead maximise has been rejected as “Invalid”.

Competing with iPad

Everyone’s talking about the iPad, so I started thinking a little further down the road. After all, if windows and mice really aren’t the future of computing, and touch screens are, you’d hope there’d be more than one manufacturer of devices in Our Glorious Computing Future. At least, I hope there is.

So, who’d make them? I can tell you who won’t: anyone relying on Windows. Microsoft’s done very well out of the last twenty years of computing, but the last decade has shown their inability to move with the times. Windows Vista was an obvious mis-step, but so is their series of Tablet Editions, because they failed to do what the iPhone OS did: rethink the interface. Instead, they expect a thin film of touch interactions to be enough, and it’s not.

Similarly, Windows Mobile’s reliance on a stylus and vestigial metaphors - the Start button, for example - hardly shows any signs of being the foundations for a usable device. Dan pointed out there’s a chance that the Xbox division might manage, and I suppose the Zune folks might have a chance, but I’d not hold my breath.

Of course, since almost every PC manufacturer relies on Microsoft for their OS, that rules out the likes of Dell, HP, Asus and Sony. So who’s left?

Nokia have dabbled with tablets before, and with the N900, they seem to have a fairly decent handheld device. Maemo might just make a good enough layer on top of Linux, but do they have the vision to make the hardware? Unfortunately, my gut feeling is that they don’t. Two or three years ago they might have been able to get away with a grand visionary play, but now, with the iPhone and Android going after their most profitable market segment, they look a bit like a wounded giant, trying to make sure they’re still going.

So that leaves Google. Their biggest issue, as far as I can tell, is that they have two OSes which overlap uncomfortably right at the point the iPad exists: the (announced but unreleased) Chrome OS, and the aforementioned Android. I don’t know enough to tell which fits better, but I expect one of them would be fine.

The company has other problems, too. So far Android hasn’t included multi-touch in the core OS or apps, because of the fear of patent litigation from Apple. It’s possible there’ll be a deal to resolve that, one way or another. In fact, I really hope there is: otherwise the monopoly I alluded to earlier will become a reality. The other issue is that they’re still not an experienced hardware manufacturer. Their first consumer product, the Nexus One, is built for them by HTC, and they’ve had teething troubles with customer relations, especially to do with getting phones working with telecoms companies. Maybe a licensee will make a tablet first, but you could argue the potential of the phone OS didn’t really surface until there was an in-house design; maybe the same would be true of a pad.

However, of all the people listed here, I suspect Google are by far the best placed to compete with Apple. Now all I have to do is wait a few years and see how wrong this post was.

A short list of Chrome issues (beta 1)

… most of which are actually due to me being stuck liking the way Safari does things, or a consequence of it being a beta.

• You can’t invert open behind - on Safari command shift click opens in a new window behind the current one with command click opening in a new window in front/focus, whereas Chrome is hard-wired to do the opposite (and with tabs to boot)
• Tab moves between all link and form elements, not just form elements. (I can’t remember if Safari picks this up from the system-level preferences or not, but it does what I want, and Chrome doesn’t.)
• There are no command key shortcuts to open bookmarks in the toolbar¹
• The combined text/title/URL completion in the “Omnibox” means you have to go too far into a URL to easily work around the lack of command key shortcuts
• You can’t set a default font size, so sites that honour relative fonts (like delicious, and (in places) Twitter) now have Huge Idiot Typefaces
• While Chrome sensibly uses the keychain (so, like Camino, it can share usernames and passwords set up in Safari) it doesn’t offer to complete the username part, meaning more typing.²

It’s been a nice evening, but despite being rock solid, Chrome goes back in the “for emergency use” box for a while. Sadly, given the team’s approach to customisation, it might be quite a long while indeed.

¹ Camino also gets this wrong, in a very odd (yet explicable) way: if the bookmark bar is visible, it works, but if it’s not, it doesn’t. The developers seem to believe that an invisible option is confusing. I believe that twenty vertical pixels on a laptop display are more precious than feedback. Sorry.
² Probably this is sensible from a security point of view but it’s annoying me, so I’m listing it anyway. I’m sure you’re sensible enough to make your own decision.

JavaScript Engines and the IE Hegemony

Another day, another JavaScript performance increase. This time, it’s the WebKit team, with the somewhat ludicrously named SquirrelFish Extreme, which manages a tenfold speed increase on Safari 3’s JSKit engine, apparently.

Oddly, it seems as if most of the work involved has been done under the auspices of the Summer of Code, Google’s programme to get college students involved in open source projects. Of course, the other newcomer on the JS engine block is their own V8.

However, good as all the competition between these two (and Mozilla’s TraceMonkey, due to be released in Firefox 3.1 and, like the others, available in pre-release form) is, it ignores the elephant in the room. As I commented on a PC Pro blog post about Chrome and Firefox (after the V8 talk at Google Developer Day), this progress is pretty much passing IE by.

John Resig’s recent benchmarks of JavaScript engines show that Internet Explorer 7 is awful, and IE8, although better, is nowhere near the performance of the released competing browsers, let alone the improved versions currently under development. Indeed, after one chart he has to note:

No results for IE were provided as the browser crashes when running the tests, unfortunately.

(To be fair, he does go on to say that Safari nightlies also failed on Windows.)

So, what’s the outlook? Clearly JS-intensive applications are here to stay, and I think we’ll increasingly see interfaces to them on the server side and possibly the desktop too. However, the developers of the most cutting-edge of these apps will either be held back by, or have to explicitly exclude, the most common browser in the world. Maybe that’ll be enough to keep Microsoft focussed on improving, and from the notes to a recent interview, it looks like they know it. Here’s hoping it works out.