thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Resources

Marvell Talks Cloud Computing, Chrome OS

Posted on 13. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

At Computex, I had the opportunity to talk to Bou Chung Lin, VP & GM of Taiwan Operations for Marvell. While we were going though an overview of the company’s offerings, we got on the subject of cloud computing and Chrome OS. Here’s a quick clip of his response to my questions regarding this.

We know that Marvell has been working on an ARM-based Chromium OS build, as our pal Charbax over at ARMDevices.net showed us earlier this year when the company showed it off running on their Armada 510 processor at CES in Las Vegas.

It will be interesting to see what will happen to Chrome OS in terms of using an ARM based solution versus an x86 one. I’ve heard rumors that Intel is readying a rival to ARM-based solutions, or perhaps start making their own ARM licensed product.

There is no doubt they are going to need to do something after some of the things that I have seen coming from ARM processors comprised of multiple cores that divvy up the duties for a device to separately process system, video and audio functions for mobile devices.

What It’s Like to be a Successful Google Apps Software Company

Posted on 08. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

MindMeister is a company that provides a special tool for organizations called “mind mapping”. Being a software as a service company, it was logical for them to be included when the Google enterprise Apps Marketplace when it was launched last March. In this interview, I talk with MindMeister COO Michael Hollauf and CTO Till Vollmer about their software, the recent changes Google has made to Apps as well as what it’s like working with the search engine giant.

Can you tell me a little bit about MindMeister?

Michael: We’ve been online for about 3 years now.  About a month ago, finally, we launched on Google Apps Marketplace.  This came out of a relationship with Google.  It started pretty early on, almost three years ago now.  We realized the product we have fits nicely with what Google has.

It’s a nice add-on for their Apps.  I’m explaining more our relationship with Google.  Since our integration, we are doing more things integrated with the Docs.  We have a regular relationship with them.  It seems they’re really pushing Apps now with the introduction of the Marketplace and the enhancements to Google Docs.

Would you say your product is similar to something you would do in Visio or is it something out on its own?

Michael: Yes, it’s certainly something that’s on its own.  Visio is something that can draw everything. You can draw pictures, flow charts. I think we’re a subset. We focus on a subset of what Visio does.  We are very good at that.  Our software basically gives it all, focuses very quickly and doesn’t worry about the drawings, it just brings in all of your structures.

So, I think someone that uses our mind mapping product wouldn’t be very happy with Visio.  More similar to drawing in a PowerPoint presentation, something like that. It’s a similar space though. We often get requests for things like flow charts and so on. It’s all graphical, visual presentation. They have something in Docs which is now called Google Drawings with a separate bar.

Is this just something that is part of the Apps marketplace? I assume that your pricing model is set up so it’s a monthly user fee or something? Anything of that nature?

Michael:  Yes, it’s a monthly user fee. It’s a monthly fee per user or teams of users so you can have two people up to however many you want. You can pay by the month or can pay by the year. The way it works in Google Apps is they don’t have a billing infrastructure. So the way we do it, we let users sign up for free without even entering their credit cards. They just go to MindMeister in Apps and get a 30 day free trial.

If you want to upgrade, you can pay and purchase. That’s going to be the way it works until we launch billing. According to Google, it should be in a couple of months when  the users will only use their credit card once – when they sign up to Google Apps. Then they will be able to do everything at the Apps Marketplace: just add the app.

Better for us and better for users. They don’t want to enter their credit cards more than they have to.

I think that’s a fantastic idea. What are they getting out of setting up all of this entire infrastructure? Is it just that they’re getting the value of added features to Apps?

Michael: Yes, now that’s the only thing they are getting, but with the billing, they are going to take twenty percent I think it is.

Twenty percent of everything then?

Michael: Yes.

I ask these things because Eric Schmidt keeps talking about how a lot of revenue is going to start to come from this. There really hasn’t been an explanation, but that right there, when you’re dealing with percentage of fees per month that really adds up.  What they’re trying to do is get away from just advertising because you really have to diversify when you’re a company that large.

Michael: They still do 97% (something like that) or 95% just with advertising. So, they are searching for other ways for (revenue).

A few weeks ago there was an announcement that went out relating to some changes they’re doing (which included no longer supporting Gears).Is it just Docs? Maybe you guys could talk a little about that.

Michael:  It was just Docs with their announcement. We’ve had to find all sorts of explanations and guidelines for our users (about Gears). It works fine for older ones; it’s just not supporting the new ones. Now I think of all of the programs and suppliers will have to do the same thing. A lot of people use it and I think if everyone is persistent, it will send out messages that it (will not be) working anymore.

It seems a little strange to me because you’d think they’d have a solution ready to go.

Michael: Our users I think, it used to work better (same with all browsers, even Firefox). It doesn’t support it anymore and you can’t even install it anymore. There are other features as well.

Till: Obviously the drawing is one of the things that are new. There are a couple of changes to things, and the API as well. The big thing was the drawing actually.

Michael: I think there is one thing talked about that real time is not being liberated enough. With this EtherPad, a document could be worked on (with others) at the same time. You could do things in real time. Like when you typed in the character, it would show up on the other person’s screen like in the same second. The real time collaboration, I think that’s what’s built into Docs now.

Well, that’s great.  Could you tell me the name of that company again? I’ve never heard of this before.

Michael: Etherpad. I think it was two or three Google employees a year ago when they started that company.

It sounds like they’re trying to make collaboration better but at the same time, the offline access (via Gears) thing is a little distressing especially when you’re thinking about moving everything to the cloud, it seems there’s going to be some sort of solution through HTML5, right?

Michael: There’s an issue, yeah. I mean real time, I didn’t see anything about that in HTML5.  Is it http or something? Or some offline mode supported in HTML5?

So, they’re going to use HTML5 for that? I don’t think they have a choice, if you lose that functionality it just seems like a really bad idea. I think the cloud is a great thing but, what happens when you make these kind of changes?  And I just don’t know what kind of solution it’s going to be that all these companies now have to make all of these changes?

Michael:  That’s because all of us use these, really out of necessity. This is something that could happen with Flash, I don’t know.  Now we have to wait. It’s not a great situation but the market shows it’s a young market and technology is new. Otherwise, this is “growing pains”, I would say.

It’s just to be so disruptive in so many areas that they’re starting to do these types of things, to be honest with you. It’s just I hear a lot about all of the benefits but I think what most people are concerned about where this is going. The idea I think, when they started this was to compete with Microsoft but now it doesn’t seem like that what they want to do. Instead, it’s to be a compliment to that. Although I do think their solution is better.

Michael: I think in our discussions they never admit Microsoft is an issue for them. They’re more like “we’re trying to offer the best experiences and solutions to our users and if that hurts our competition, so be it”. I think it’s more not having to really talk about their competitors and so on. At least I think with Google Apps, that they’re trying to be the “next generation Office Suite”.

I think they’ll have a lot more to offer than Microsoft because of what they’re doing with you guys and all the other developers out there, that they have good ideas to make products better.

Michael: Great people are on it and (there is) a lot of enthusiasm. I haven’t really looked into Microsoft recently and what the rumors are about an online version of this. And because, sooner or later, they’ll have to go this way. All I’ve seen so far is some online office thing that allows you to share some uploaded documents with others but that’s all there is, right?

What about the people who are concerned about making the jump to the cloud?

Till: There are certain levels of security of course in (our) product. One thing is the channel hosting of the solutions in the computer to the data center and everything has access controls, cameras, access cards and all these kinds of things. Everything is redundant, their internet access of course, and the server part and all these kinds of things. So that’s the secure environment.

On the other hand of course, we offer for our premium customers encryption, so that the communication that is between the server and client is encrypted because a lot of people are working are just going there and connecting to their services and are often transmitting their plain passwords and this is not clear to all of them. That’s why we use SSL for the premium customers to not show their passwords somewhere or their passwords don’t get sniffed.

And on the application level, we have certain guard mechanisms where we protect certain actions people can do like password resetting, map access and personal data access.  Just two hours ago a customer called me up and said, “I want to use your product,  I was thinking about an in-house destination.”  I said, “we have a service solution, there is no in-house solution”.  They asked, “what about security?”

I think that it’s a good point that they ask this question.  The answer is very simple. I say, “Do you have a laptop?”  They usually say, ” Yes I have a laptop.”  I ask, “Do you have all of your personal data and all that stuff on your laptop?” They say, “Yes.”  So I ask, “What happens if someone just grabs it and runs?”  They say, “Yes you’re right.”  This isn’t going to happen with software as a solution because it’s much harder to hack into a T3 data center or get physical access into a data center than just grabbing your laptop.

Could give me an idea of who are your demographics when you’re talking about customers and who are the people that come to talk to you about these types of things?  If you could just give me an idea of what type of people we’re talking about – who are becoming your customers?

Till: When we started off, we were a European company and we had just implemented the English language and we always wanted to address the whole world market. It was always our goal when we started. We had about 30% US customers and, actually it’s the same number I think today and maybe even more.

Actually, now we support nine languages, including Japanese and Russian and with customers from about 140 countries working on MindMiester now, about a half million or so of them. We have five hundred thousand users and we have individuals and freelancers as well as a very large base of real business customers like SAP for example or Symantec. We even have Microsoft as a customer. Microsoft China, actually at an innovation center there.

It’s basically around the world from individuals to businesses. We have a lot of universities and schools.  This is in a lot of countries in terms of schools and universities in Shanghai or in Hong Kong or (even) in the US. So, that’s also the interesting thing. If you’re starting a business on the Internet there really is no real border anymore. It’s all about localizing the content and the user interface.

MindMeister is a software as a service. So we’re talking about something that runs in the browser. What tools have you used to create this, what technology are you running this on?

Till: So, basically we are using Ruby on Rails. We are using MySQL right now. We are using Apache for example, Linux as our platform. I think that’s it from the technology web we are using.

So do you recommend that your users have Chrome or Firefox? Or what is it about the browser that’s changing that? That’s going to help you guys? We touched on HTML5 and how you guys are working on it. Could talk a little bit about that?

Till: We made recommendations, we put out these for our users only. If they have to, we’ll continue to support IE6 for a little longer.  Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, these are all great and open really fast.

How many people are you in total?

Michael: Ten to twelve right now, with a couple of freelancers, not a huge company.

Is the plan then to just focus on this is another thing. Other companies I’ve talked with are working on several different apps.  Are you just going to focus on this?

Michael: For the time being, yes. We have discussions all the time. To the extent that they could go further? No concrete plans as of yet. The market is good for that. We’re in a really good position. I have so many ideas for this. I do want to start something else with that small group of people.

I have just one more question. Since the Marketplace has gone live, has it been a good tool in getting new customers? Has it been a marketing vehicle for you guys?  Have you seen a good influx of customers who’ve come through Google to connect with you guys?

Michael: Definitely, yes. So, I think it’s worth the effort to integrate to get a lot of exposure. Of course, you get new customers out of it, for us I think it’s a good thing. And, so, Google hasn’t really started to promote the whole thing. I had a call yesterday with them and they told us they would start promoting apps more aggressively.

Even so, they haven’t really started marketing. We already see the results.  We’ll see what happens if they really start pushing (Apps) through their distribution channels and through the marketing, etc.

Thanks to Michael and Till for taking the time to talk to me. You can sign up for a free basic membership of MindMeister to check out their mind mapping product.

Understanding the Benefits of Google Apps for Business

Posted on 27. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

More often lately we have been discussing the impact of Google in the enterprise market. It’s all for good reason: with the launch of the Apps Marketplace Google’s software suite for business rivals that of the competition that is out there. Not to mention it is allowing companies of all sizes to get up and running for a per user license fee, with varying cost structure for add-ons that can be implemented though the Apps Marketplace.

For those of us who haven’t switched to Google Apps for business, this may all seem overwhelming. That’s why we took the opportunity to talk to Jim McNelis, a Google Apps “subject matter expert” and CEO of Dito LLC which works with companies to implement a Google solution for their businesses. Dito is also one of the initial Apps Marketplace partners.

Thanks for taking the time to do this Jim. So, how is business since the arrival of the App Marketplace?

Businesses are waking up to the fact that the old way of managing email is dead. Email no longer requires vertical integration; instead businesses can leverage the power of Google’s Cloud to increase workforce productivity while decreasing CapEx and Operating Expenses. The introduction of the Google Apps Marketplace will prove to be a key differentiator as customers evaluate competing messaging and collaboration platforms.

The SaaS delivery method has certain inherent advantages, not the least of which is rapid development and delivery of solutions to market. Ultimately, businesses and end-users will benefit from the continuous innovation cycle — developers responding to customer needs — enabled by the Google Apps Marketplace. In fact, it was that exact innovation cycle that spurred Dito Directory for Google Apps: We received a few dozen requests from prospective and existing clients for a better Domain Shared Contacts management for Google Apps.

Tell us a little bit more about what Dito does.

Dito provides Google Apps Solutions — Deployment, Training, Support, & Development — to organizations seeking to leverage of Google’s disruptive cloud technology. Our entire approach begins with listening and responding to our customers’ needs. Whether a client needs the proverbial “boost” to migrate up into the Google Apps cloud or expertise to further integrate Google Apps within their workflow, Dito has the expertise customers need to quickly leverage the technology within their organization.

What are the types of companies you’re working with that have an interest in your services?

We serve a very eclectic sample of customers: from a 3-user Real Estate Investment Firm, ~200 user Home Improvement publication, to a government organization finding ways to stretch their budget during these difficult economic times.

What are some ways for companies to test or try out Google Apps for their business?

A 2-4 week pilot of Google Apps, alongside their current email solution, isn’t uncommon. Some companies have already decided that Google Apps is a good fit before contacting Dito…maybe they have been Gmail users for years and just found out that Google Apps is here for their business.

Can you talk about how administration works on this platform and what IT folks in an organization need to do on the back end?

Administration of Google Apps is fairly straight-forward for most common tasks. There are more and more advanced configuration and integration points that require additional knowledge, but Google does a pretty good (job) of documenting these features. With that said, Dito provides solutions for these advanced configuration and integration points. It’s kinda what we do.

What kind of impact will Google Apps Marketplace have on developers as opposed to other application stores that exist?

It’s still pretty early since the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace, but we have already had hundreds of admins install Dito Directory via the marketplace. We are very encouraged by the prospect of this new app marketplace. We have already installed several apps off the marketplace for use in our everyday processes that integrate really well with Google Apps.

Google has a hit on their hands with the new Apps Marketplace. They are allowing 3rd parties to address the users’ needs directly. Google simply cannot develop the multitude of apps that Google Apps users demand. The marketplace serves the customer’s needs, which is why it will end up being a big hit with users and developers.

One concern that many have about using Google Docs for business is compatibility with other solutions such as Microsoft.

With 3rd party apps like OffiSync, the ability to upload any document into Google Docs up to 1gb, and Google’s recent acquisition of DocVerse, those computability issues are becoming a thing of the past.

Is there anything you can tell us that you feel would help make Chrome OS for the enterprise successful?

I think the main factors to Chrome OS’s success are security, reliability, & affordability. This assumes the OS is tightly integrated with Google Apps.

On the subject of the App Marketplace, could you talk a little bit about the Dito Directory app?

Dito Directory was recently featured on the Google Apps Developers Blog: Google Apps Developer Blog.

Dito Directory Value Prop:

As a Google Apps user, have you ever noticed Domain Shared Contacts isn’t quite ‘up to snuff’? Trust us, you are not alone in your observation. Dito Directory for Google Apps fills the gaps in Domain Shared Contacts management by seamlessly integrating the following features:

-Bulk Upload large numbers of Domain Shared Contacts via Google Docs
-Browse the entire Domain Shared Contacts Directory for your domain
-Add/Edit/Delete Domain Shared Contacts
-Copy Domain Shared Contact to Personal Contacts
-Instantly add Contacts on your mobile device via Google Sync for your phone
-Edit User Profiles

You can install the Lite version here and upgrade to the Pro version ($99/domain/year) via Google Checkout to take advantage of the advanced features (e.g. Bulk Upload, Manage 50+ Contacts, and Copy to Personal Contacts). Once installed, Dito Directory will appear in the ‘more’ category of the universal navigation bar located in the upper-left corner of the Google Apps interface.

Please note that Dito Directory requires Education or Premier version since we integrate with the Google API’s.

Are there any other apps that you have in the pipeline?

None we can discuss at this time…but we are working on some exciting stuff. In the near-term, expect to see regular updates to Dito Directory. Our first update will come as early as next week, which adds the ability to manage Group Email addresses, and add those email addresses to the shared contacts list.

Interview: HTML5 Standards Author Ian Hickson

Posted on 05. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Ian Hickson has worked as a proponent of web standards for years. He is the maintainer of the Acid Tests website, which is a tool for browsers to make sure that they are fully compliant with today’s web standards. The most recent revision, Acid3, was developed to help browsers follow standards compliance with web 2.0 technologies.

Ian has been employed by Netscape, Opera Software, and now works for Google. He also was the lead on authoring the standards for HTML5. While he couldn’t talk about anything related to Chrome or Google with us, he answered our questions so that we can better understand this new web standard a bit better.

Tell us about yourself and how you got involed in HTML 5.

I was at Opera in 2003, working half in QA and half in their standards group, when the W3C called for a member vote on XForms (at that time the next generation of web forms, see here). Opera and some other companies — Apple and Mozilla in particular, though we were supported by some others also — tried to make the point that abandoning HTML wasn’t such a hot idea, and so we decided to write a proof of concept to show that it was possible to add many of the features of XForms to HTML. I happened to have some free time so I was volunteered to write it. We called it XForms Basic or something like that, and it wasn’t very popular at the W3C, so we lost the vote. However, it convinced us that it was the right direction to go in, so we worked on it a bit more, and renamed it to Web Forms 2.0 to avoid confusion with XForms.

In 2004 there was a big workshop organised by the W3C to Make a Decision about how we were going to move forward on the Web, and the W3C staff and many of the members voted for continuing down the path of XHTML2 and XForms, and said that if we wanted to work on HTML we should do so elsewhere, because the W3C had decided it was done with that.

So we opened a mailing list called the WHATWG to continue work on Web Forms 2.0 in public, and later that year started a new draft called Web Applications 1.0 into which we put many features aimed at writing Web apps, including a new version of HTML that we jokingly called HTML5, and a bunch of other features that later became Web Storage, Web Sockets, Server-Sent Events, and a variety of other specs.

Around 2005 I moved from Opera to Google, so that I could focus specifically on the spec work — Opera still wanted me to work 50% on QA, but Google were willing to let me work 100% on the specs.

Later, around 2006 or 2007, the W3C basically realised they had made a mistake, and they asked if they could work on HTML5 as well, so we renamed Web Applications 1.0 to HTML5, and the WHATWG and the W3C started working together. Web Forms 2.0 got merged into HTML5, and most of the bits of HTML5 that weren’t really HTML got split out into separate specs.

How far along is this technology? As in, when can users expect to see this on a regular basis?

Many parts of it were done before we started, because we took existing proprietary features and just specified them. For example, XMLHttpRequest was first specified in Web Applications 1.0, years after Microsoft invented it and all the other browsers copied it. It was later spun off into its own spec at the W3C. Other parts are brand new, and haven’t been implemented anywhere yet. Some parts might never get implemented, and we’ll throw them out when that becomes clear.

People are starting to use parts of HTML5 today. It depends really on what fraction of browsers you want to target. If you only care about Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, you can use the “canvas” element today without any trouble… but IE doesn’t support it. If you only care about IE, you can use onhashchange… but the other browsers don’t support it. I would give it a few years before the majority of the features are implemented everywhere, but who knows. After all, not everything in HTML_4_ is implemented everywhere yet, and people use that without even thinking about it!

How significant is the canvas tag and svg for HTML 5? Do you know of any good examples of this on the web right now?

IE doesn’t support this either, so it’s hard to find widely deployed uses of those, but there are some. Yahoo! Pipes has used it  for some time. Dreamhost uses it in their hosting panel.

Talk a bit about how offline storage will work. Many users are concerned about being able to work offline.

The Offline Application Cache feature is actually pretty straight-forward. If you design your application such that it can work without contacting the server, then you just list all the files it uses (HTML pages, CSS, JS, images, etc) in a manifest using a simple format, and it works offline. The way it works is the first time you visit the page, it gets the manifest, downloads all the files, and the next time you visit the page, it just uses the downloaded files, regardless of whether you’re online or not – it then downloads the new files in the background, in case they have been updated. This makes things faster as well as making them work offline. If your application uses online data, though, like a Web mail application, you will have to do extra work to actually maintain an offline copy of the mail for the user, that’s not handled by the page.

Have you heard anything about 3D on the web? Will HTML 5 support this?

The Khronos Group is working on a 3D canvas context, but I don’t know much about it. Canvas is a part of HTML5.

Lastly, what is in store for the future when talking about HTML 5 on the web?

From the point of view of standards, HTML5 is old hat now! The WHATWG is already moving on to the next generation of HTML. One of the changes we’re making is that we’re no longer numbering the versions… in practice it hasn’t made much sense. Browsers started implementing HTML”5″ stuff before all the HTML”4″ stuff was implemented, and they ship whatever they have at the time they ship… it’s not like the version numbers really mean anything useful. So there’s just “HTML”, and we keep improving it.

One of the ideas we’re looking at is video-conferencing, but it needs a common codec even more than , so we’re kinda stuck with that. It’s also not clear how we should do the networking — there are lots of standards like SIP and Jingle that we could use, but they’re all really complicated, and not a good fit for what we’re doing.

On the nearer term, we’re going through all the feedback we’ve been getting on HTML5, and fixing bugs. There’s lots of work still to be done.

Must Read: Interview with Chrome OS Engineering Director

Posted on 21. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

A fantastic in-depth article came out yesterday about Chrome OS that comes from those behind the scenes at Google. This was an interview that was done back in November with Chrome OS lead engineer Matthew Papakipos and Google PR’s Eitan Bencuya. They talk about a myriad of topics, from the conceptualization of Chrome OS out of Chrome browser development, why we call netbooks what we do and who the target market is for Chrome OS.

One of the big issues addressed is the difference between a phone and a netbook. For many (including myself) it seems difficult to understand why there is both Android and Chrome OS. But the reality is that until there is a breakthrough in usability design that allows a phone and a netbook to converge, there really does need to be a clear separation between netbooks and smartphones. The concept of tablets and smartbooks are moving technology in that direction, but until you are able to pull a Chrome OS machine out of your pocket and use it just like a full fledged computer, this is the way things have to be.

The best part? The quote from Papakipos on what Chromium OS really is:  ”it is challenging—we haven’t figured this all out.”

That’s what is intriguing.

Interview: Chrome OS Zero’s Hexxeh

Posted on 14. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

From Chrome OS Diet to Cherry and now the latest, Zero, Hexxeh has been the primary source for Chrome OS build releases ever since Google released the Chromium code to the masses in November. They’ve been popular mostly because they work with a lot of existing hardware, plus the builds are small enough to fit on any USB drive. We got a chance to ask some questions of Hexxeh, who just released Chrome OS Zero a few days ago and talks about how he got started, future job prospects and some features in his latest version.

Tell us about yourself.

Well I’m a UK college student doing AS levels, planning on doing Computer Science at uni. I do web development work here and there, worked a few cool projects. I’d say Chromium OS is one of the most interesting yet, though.

Why did you get you involved in Chrome OS?

I first heard about ChromeOS mid-2009 when the rumours were flying around about an OS from Google. When they made the announcement in November, I just saw it and thought “that looks like it’d be cool to play with”. So I downloaded a copy that night, a couple of hours and a bit of tinkering later, I had it running on my netbook, and I was happy with it. I decided to share it with a few friends who wanted to play around too, and they liked it, and shared it around. So then I just created a site to share it on, I didn’t really have any intention of keeping it up to date, it was just something fun to toy around with for a bit. But then a few tech news sites made posts about it. This killed my small home server stone dead. It was clear people wanted more. So I released Chromium OS Diet, and the same happened again. It just went from there really, two versions later we’re at Zero and I’ve no intention of stopping yet, still got lots of ideas for new features and improvements.

Has the Google Chromium team been helpful when you have had problems come up?

Yeah, they have Google Groups where you can ask questions and it’s proved really useful, it tends to be the case that if I hit a problem, someone else had to and there was a fix. Where there wasn’t, I could ask and many people would come to the rescue and help me out. All in all, they’ve been great.

Are you getting a lot of support from the open-source community? In what ways have they helped you develop this project?

Many an open-source developer has offered to help out with various things, mirroring of the files, supporting the build server by buying shares of it as VPSes and so on. The #linux and #chromium-os  IRC (freenode) channels have been a great source of information too.

How much time do you spend working on this?

Too long, haha! When I get down to working on it, I’ll spend all night getting it to work, I don’t like leaving it until it works or it’s 6AM. This gets especially difficult when combined with college. But it’s totally worth it, I love reading the responses from people who’ve tried it out.

What are your goals for working on Chrome OS? There must be something that drives you to do this.

Long term goals are vastly improved hardware support. Obviously, we’ll follow the main Chromium OS source tree too, so any improvements made there will flow downstream to my builds. I hear stuff in the pipeline includes 3G modem support, multi-language support and a new login UI. Anyone interested can check out the main Chromium OS wiki, much of the stuff there will make it’s way into the open-source builds. I like to think I might be building myself the possibility of working with Google is in the cards too, but we’ll have to see about that.

What do you think are the best new features of Chrome OS Zero?

The speed increases are one of the biggest things for most people. Personally, I’m a fan of the new artwork that was added, gives the build amore unique feel and makes it indentifiable against any others. While the update system didn’t ship with Zero, it will be able to be installed separately as a feature, that’s the big one for me. Right now, if I want to release even the tiniest of updates, that means a full new build. There is a lot of work that goes into the build, and it can take a very long time to get it ready to download. The faster I can get the new stuff out to people and get feedback, the better.

Can you talk about how the auto-update capability works in Chrome OS Zero?

It’s pretty simple actually, the way I’ve designed it is so that it downloads a shell script from my server along with a payload archive, and simply executes the script so that the update is installed. After a reboot, anything changed should be available. You should get an pop-up message upon login if an update is available, with an option to install it or ignore it. There are a couple limitations, mostly the amount of disk space allocated by the image.  If it becomes a problem I’ll either have to try and trim more out of the OS or just publish a larger build. I’m hoping this will please the people who’ve been asking about fixing the problem where they lose their settings upon re-imaging a new version. The biggest potential issue is that I make a change breaks something for someone else. I could maintain revert scripts, but I dunno, I think it’d be better for everyone if they just reported problems when they arise and I’ll try and get on it asap. Hopefully people can understand it’s not exactly easy to implement something like this. Updates won’t be forced, but I can’t really support old versions, so it’s best to keep up. Hopefully this’ll please those with slower connections and low download limits too, downloading an update is far less expensive in terms of bandwidth than a full new image. You will, however, need to do full updates now and then to get the latest Chromium OS code, this is very difficult to do in an update cleanly.

What’s up with Flash? Is it Adobe or what?

Heh, the amount of people who’ve asked me about this! Was a case of bad luck really, I just happened to check out the code for Chromium at a point when there were problems with Flash, they were fixed very shortly after but I’d already started the build process and didn’t know. Hoping to push a hotfix out for this via the update system beta soon, along with a fix for Bookmark Sync.

Lastly, can you talk about what’s in store in the future for you?

I don’t know yet, but I’m pretty excited to find out myself. There was talk of the possibility of something happening with a couple companies, but we’ll see how it pans out. I’ll let you know how I get on, heh.