Chrome On The Eee Pad Transformer

Posted on 13. Aug, 2011 by Nicholas Greene. 1 Comments

A very interesting series of tweets from Liam Mcullough earlier this week. For those of you who don’t know, Mcullough- also known by his nickname, Hexxeh, is the man who’s more or less been solely responsible for pretty much every Chromium OS release since Chrome first hit the market. He’s also the fellow who loaded Chrome onto a Macbook Air. With that information in mind, it was pretty clear what his intentions were when he tweeted on Sunday that he was “picking up an Asus transformer tomorrow, with the keyboard dock.” That said, he continued by establishing that he was “not interested in running Android on there.”

After spending about a day fiddling around with his new purchase(which apparently rather impressed him), Hexxeh managed to load Google’s Chrome OS onto the rig, as made evident by the screenshot above. Though it’s kind of hard to tell due to the lighting, that is none other than the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, complete with a shiny new OS- and it definitely isn’t Android.

Now, before you folks go getting all excited; there are a few things we’ll first need to establish. One; this isn’t as much of a total system overhaul as with the Macbook Air, either- in this case, he booted straight from a USB drive, in order to make it easier to work on the image. Second, the current build of Chromium on the Transformer is suffering from some…pretty nasty bugs, if Hexxeh’s to be believed. When asked about how well it ran, he responded with the following:

“runs terribly things to some huge bugs in the LDK, gonna try to work around them by patching Chromium and the WM. Basics like WiFi, touchscreen work, sound is MIA right now but that’s an easy fix.”

So….long story short, he’s still working feverishly on getting this system up and running. Those of you expecting a touch-based UI might be a bit disappointed, though. Hexxeh’s made it clear that he’s not keen on building a touch interface for the transformer at the current moment- seems likely he’s more focused on getting the basics working before he starts fiddling with the onscreen keyboard- something which is made possible thanks to the transformer’s rather excellent keyboard dock.

Currently, Hexxeh’s managed to shave ten seconds off the boot time of the Transformer (No word on how long it takes to load, I’ll keep you posted), and the release date for this build is…basically “TBA.” According to Mcullough, when or if he releases this build hinges entirely on when he finds the time to finish it.

Considering how fast he seems to work, I’d imagine it’ll probably be some time next month.

Either way, it’s pretty exciting news- as he put it, the experiment is basically “complete proof of concept” regarding the viability of Chrome as a tablet OS. Of course, we sort of knew the concept was true from the beginning- Hexxeh’s just demonstrating it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

You can follow Hexxeh on Twitter here, or visit his blog and toss a donation his way here.

Image Credits: Hexxeh

Is A Chrome OS Tablet In The Works?

Posted on 09. Aug, 2011 by Nicholas Greene. 4 Comments

Looks like Google might be working on a tablet that runs Chrome OS. Or at the very least, the Chromium team’s working on one that’ll run Chromium.

Now, we don’t have much to go on here. There’s been a lot of rumors and heresy bouncing about on the web about this. Ever since the Chromebooks first hit the market, folks have been buzzing about the possibility of tablets, pointing at this move by Google or that action by the Chrome Team. And while it’s true that there is some evidence that points to the eventual development of a Chrome OS tablet…we might not be seeing one for a very, very long time.

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Looking at Chrome’s Sync Internals Page

Posted on 13. Jun, 2011 by Nicholas Greene. 2 Comments

So, we’ve got a (relatively) new functionality in Google Chrome’s browser and OS. Known as chrome://sync-internals, it’s pretty much what’s written on the box- it lets you view internal and technical data about your connection to the Google Cloud. It’s pretty simple to use, and pretty simple to navigate as well- though I get the feeling that several tabs (and for that matter, some of the information) is intended primarily for devs, and not for your average, run of the mill user.

The Basics

Anyway, I’ll give you folks a rundown of the sync-internals page, and then go over how to search your sync data. The first tab, “About” is pretty straightforward. It’s pretty much a summary page, and tells you the status of your sync. You can see when you last synced, whether you’re authenticated, the server you’re syncing to….you get the idea. Note that here, like much of ‘sync-internals’, you’ll need a touch of technical knowledge to understand some of the listed information.

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CRX-Less Webapps Appears in Chrome Labs

Posted on 30. Nov, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 3 Comments

The most recent builds of Chromium are showing a feature that allows for different types of webapps to be installed with Chrome called CRX-less webapps. The CRX file name is used for installation of Chrome extensions.

According to the Google Code site, a CRX file contains:

These are then placed in a CRX file, which is compressed much like a ZIP file.

Relying on a manifest file in a web page, which is simply text, instead of a CRX could result in a more streamlined process for packaging/installing webapps. I’m going to assume that somehow these files are marked as trusted and require Chrome users to allow/disallow installation.

RockMelt Social Browser is New Entrant Based on Chromium

Posted on 08. Nov, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 6 Comments

One of the founders of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, is backing a new social browser called RockMelt. It’s based off of the Chromium code and aims to add more social functionality than other other browsers. This has already been done with a browser called Flock which is also based on Chromium, but I’d put my money on Andreessen staying with this venture for the long haul.

As he said recently, “We think it is a fantastic time to build a company around a browser.”

Do you think that’s true in 2010? Decide for yourself by getting an early invitation to RockMelt.

Chrome 9 Appears

Posted on 23. Oct, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments

Version 9 of Chrome is on its way. This is because the builds of Chromium that are released frequently throughout the day have now reached 9.

What’s going to be new in Chrome 9? It’s hard to say, the releases are starting to come so fast most of the work being done is on bug fixes and the like. We can expect to see more “about:flags” functionality along the way, and the implementation of more File API specifications should be coming along for the release of the webapp-laden Chrome Web Store.

For Android and Chrome, Open Development is Different

Posted on 22. Oct, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Recently, Google VP of Engineering Andy Rubin took to Twitter in an effort to take a shot at the openness of Android when compared to Apple’s iOS. That certainly got former Mozilla engineer Joe Hewitt fired up, tweeting some thoughts about the actual openness of Google’s smartphone platform.

Since it’s pretty hard to get in-depth on Twitter about the technicalities of open-source, Hewitt wrote a full blog post and he makes a lot of good points. Unlike Android, Chromium has been developed in the public eye and people outside of Google are capable of following the progress with builds of both the browser and the OS.

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Standard Hardware Acceleration Features Pushed to Chrome 9

Posted on 13. Oct, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

CNET is reporting that although hardware acceleration can be enabled in current versions of Chrome available, it won’t come standard to the browser until at least Chrome 9. Jason Kersey, a Program Manager for Chrome at Google, announced on the Chromium development discussion list recently indicating that version 8 is going to soon be pushed to the Canary and Development builds.

That means we can expect Chrome 7 to move to stable very soon. It was about six weeks ago when 6 went stable, so an announcement should be just around the corner.

Disable Outdated Plugins, XSS Auditor Hits Chromium Labs

Posted on 01. Oct, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Two new Google Chrome Labs have popped up with the most recent builds: the ability to disable a plugin that is out of date and an XSS auditor. Both can be used if you download the newest Chromium browser version and type in “about:labs” in the Omnibox. A restart of the browser will then enable these new features.

Before now, there really wasn’t a way to easily shut down plugins in Chrome that were out of date. Now with the amount of expected plugins to increase, the browser can reference whether or not a plugin is updated and offer to download the latest version. This is a security feature that takes the effort of updating right out of the users’ hands so that the browser has less vulnerability.

The other feature in the new builds is the XSS Auditor. XSS is cross-site scripting, and it allows for client side injection of malicious code into web pages. While Chrome already has some ability to identify this type of code by warning users of suspicious sites, this helps developers find issues within web code that could potentially be problematic.

More code in complex websites and more plugins for interactive content are on the way for browsers. These are just more security features to help keep the more dangerous elements of the web in check.

Tabbed Options Menu Comes to Labs in Chromium

Posted on 14. Sep, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 3 Comments

Today’s build of Chromium has brought a new feature to the Google Chrome Labs “about:labs” feature when entered into the Omnibox: the ability to open the options menu in a HTML-built tab. Since the concept of Chrome is everything in the cloud, this feature is a logical step further towards that end and will surely pop up in Chrome channels sometime soon.

Once you enable the option, the browser will prompt you for a restart, and when you access the Options menu through the wrench icon, you get a tab with your settings. Everything is the same, just in a slightly different format.

Check it out with one of today’s Chromium builds, and let us know if you like the new options menu.

Using the Speech Attribute Feature in Chrome 7

Posted on 31. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 9 Comments

Another new feature that is a part of Chrome 7 is the ability to talk into the browser. This would be useful for Google’s voice search technology just like what is available for smartphones. For the time being we’ll have to suffice with a demo by developer Jeremy Selier, which uses the Google Translate API to convert spoken English into French text.

You don’t even have to use a command line switch for this one. Just make sure that you have the most recent version of Chromium downloaded (the speech attribute demo only works on Windows and Mac). Then head over to Selier’s demo page hosted by AppEngine.

The demo can take spoken language in English and convert it into French. There are a number of uses for something like this, and having speech in the browser will make for some intriguing web applications down the road.

Selier has more details on the code in a blog post. Here is a technical document on using speech for HTML elements for developers.

Chrome Web Store Appears in Chrome 7

Posted on 30. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

The newest version of Chrome 7 now includes the Chrome Web Store icon when you open a new tab.

This screenshot was taken from the 7.0.510.0 release of Chromium, which you can download from here. When you click on the icon it leads you to the official Chrome Extensions site. When the Chrome Web Store is launched, extensions and webapps will both be featured on the site.

The Chrome Web Store is expected to launch in October and will feature webapps and web games. There is a developer preview available right now if you’re interested in creating your own webapps.