aamir virani

Is Chrome OS the future of home computing?

Google announced its Chrome OS last week, and it’s focused on the cloud. You basically get a browser and web-based applications to replace all the stuff you love. In fact, the OS is so cloud-focused it even resets itself on errors by downloading itself.

Let’s discount the availability of Internet everywhere. Look beyond the fact Google Gears is still flaky and doesn’t work seamlessly with Google’s own products, GMail and Google Calendar. These things can and will get better.

Google’s strategy is to sync everything to the cloud and assume its accessibility everywhere: your laptop at home, your desktop at work, your Android phone, and now, your netbook (or other coming device). The cloud is actually Google’s servers, though, which works out nicely for them.

Compare this to Apple’s 2001 vision of the home Macintosh being a hub for your digital lifestyle. You go home, you use your computer. You plug in your iPod. You plug in your iPhone. You plug in your iTablet. Your home machine has everything, and the peripheral devices work to parcel out the information in the context you need them.

Microsoft is on this side as well, but they’re following a weird disjointed path that focuses on the cool new thing every year: Microsoft Home Server to sync your multiple PCs at home, Windows 7 to catch Mac OS X, Windows Mobile 7 to catch iPhone OS. In an attempt to keep their fingers in every pie, Microsoft acts as if everything needs to work together instead of a subset.

You don’t need everything synced to a cloud: music, email, and calendar are good enough for most people.

Apple has figured this out – that’s why they called it a digital media hub.

Microsoft is close – instead of competing with Apple on a product-by-product basis they should do three things:

1. allow XBox360 to store your music and videos locally
2. allow synching for Windows Mobile 7 and Zune HD to an XBox360
3. bring calendar and email to XBox Dashboard through Windows Live

Google and its Chrome OS, meanwhile, are a different path. I can see why technophiles geek out to this (”I can get my spreadsheet anywhere!”), but I can do that using Dropbox anyway, and I get a nicer UI.

Software doesn’t always win the day, especially when you’re dealing with normal humans who don’t know (or care) what a cloud is.

I’m now a Mac not PC

I finally bought a new MacBook this month. After a year of waiting for the rumors to come true (first Leopard, then Santa Rosa, then flash-based ultra-portables), I took the plunge and bought the middle-tier white one.

Moving from PC to Mac is something covered in a lot of locations; the most useful links I found are:

• Top 10 Mac Utilities (Lifehacker)
• Rebuild Your Mac with 20 Useful Downloads (Lifehacker)

After one week of actually working on this laptop, here is a list of software I installed to get going.

Must Have for Survival

Firefox

This is a no-brainer, especially if you’re coming from PC. It’s a browser, it’s familiar, it works, and it has a ton of useful add-ons. I don’t know much about Safari and at this point I don’t really care.

Adium

A cross-platform IM client that works with GoogleTalk, AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, and more. It’s beautiful, has no ads, and works with no hitches as long as you’re an IM purist (in other words, you just IM – I don’t know much about the file transfer, video, etc., capabilities).

Flip4Mac’s Windows Media Components for QuickTime

For those times when you need to watch a video in Windows Media Player (WMP) format, this plug-in will allow the stream to work with the QuickTime Viewer.

Really Useful

Growl

Growl is a System Notifier that other programs plug into. It’s sort of like that little speech bubble that pops up in Windows XP near your clock saying that updates are available. In this case, though, any program can add support for Growl notifications, so you can always see these pop-ups for when people in IM get online, when Firefox has downloaded something, when GMail has a new message, and more. As expected, it looks beautiful.

VLC

Every other description calls this a “Swiss Army Knife” for video, so this may be the only thing you need for all of those video formats out there on the Internet.

Transmission

A free BitTorrent client so that you can find your favorite files online and get them quickly; if you want more functionality , Azareus also works well.

CyberDuck

You can use the command-line if you like, but if you want a pretty GUI for FTP, CyberDuck sounds like the best free choice. There is also a Firefox add-on called FireFTP, but I like my web and FTP client separated.