20 hours in the cloud. Putting the Cr-48 to the test.

My Cr-48 arrived Friday, December 17th... wow, has it only been 10 days? I went through the ritual of opening up something from Google, e.g. reading everything, every note, package insert, and even digging in the bottom of the box, which is where I found the big sticker... Why has no one else mentioned finding it? ;-]


I plugged it in, and left it to charge for an hour while I tended to work. Good thing the work involved being out of the office, as that was a tough hour to pretend to be working and not playing... Then, I had to apply the decal. I figured if Google went to the trouble to send these fancy 3M post-it style decals, then the least I could do would be to put them on...

I have done a lot of testing of ChromeOS, so the power-up login procedure was no surprise, just connect to your wifi, enter your Google Account user/pass, and then sit back while it goes through the first boot. [the first time for any first time ChromeOS boot can sometimes take over a minute]


I was pleasantly surprised that the Cr-48 auto-downloaded updates as soon as it booted. I saw the same behavior from the December 7th build. The start up time for me took a bit longer, because the browser needed to install the 38 extensions I have sync'd to my Google docs. As expected, the Chrome browser fills the entire screen, no borders at all [the screenshots are the raw images, no cropping performed].


I promised Google I would make the Cr-48 be my main desktop for the foreseeable future, so I set out to do just that. Only problem was that Friday night was the night I set aside to make a new business card. Oops. I can do this... The first thing I did was go shopping for apps. I grabbed Picnik, the Aviary suite, box.net, YouTube and of course, Gmail. 


I fired up Aviary, and proceeded to try and do all this in the cloud. The first step was to import my new logo into Aviary from Picasa Web. I pulled up the logo, and grabbed the url to the image so I could paste it into Aviary. Once pasted in, I could start building an image that would fit the card.

Once the image was imported, I set out to set up a blank image, all black, and then place the various parts on different layers so I could place  things where I wanted. Aviary did not seem to have the font I wanted, so once the image was centered, I saved my changes as a new image and sent it back to my Picasa Web Album.

I used the Picnik editor in Picasa to add the text to my card, as it has this killer font called Guild of Professional Actors which is available if you are a premium user. Picnik lays text on images as layer type objects, so once you place them, you can move the objects, and edit the size or the color. I like Flash, but I am itching to get that Try the html5 beta version... [hint, hint, Robin... ;-]

Once I was satisfied with the placement and size of the text, I saved the image back to Picasa Web as a new file and I now have a new face to my business cards, all ready to be sent off to the printers.


The Aviary suite also contains audio and sample/sequence creation programs. I have not done much music and audio work on PCs for a while, but the tools you now have for online editing of audio tracks are intuitive and simple.

I will not go into the details regarding the options and capabilities of the audio tools, mainly because I could not do them justice. The tools are there, they are free, and you really ought to take them for a spin. You might be pleasantly surprised at their performance.


Aviary Music Creator has tons of sampled instruments, and the sequencer is a breeze to use. I got totally hooked on reading in samples from Quantum Tracks, testing them out, and then mixing them up. I imagine some of the stress in the world right now lead me to play with the sample family called fallouja_fallout. I swear, I played that a lot while uploading screenshots and checking Buzz... 

All in all, I throughly enjoyed my marathon session that first night. The device is a dream to work on, and is my constant companion. It is my main desktop, and I only fire up a netbook if there is an application I just cannot do yet on ChromeOS. So far, the only thing still stumping me is streaming Shoutcast type http streams in html5 players... No such animal yet... Looks like it is time to learn how to write and extension or a web app... 


Of course, as soon as I get close, the built in media player for ChromeOS will magically start working...
Update 12222010: Yeah, the media player now works... I probably had not tried to play any local media. Oops.

;-] 


Update: I hit the road on Tuesday at 10 am and spent the entire day using the Cr-48. I figure it was active 50% of the time. When I got home at 7 pm, the battery was at 50%.


Sounds like the 8 hour battery life might be just about right...
I'm just sayin'... ;-]
--egrep