On the Google Chrome OS and my mom

My mom sure could use one of those Google PCs.

She's a veteran school teacher. She doesn't like using computers and hates the fact that she has to configure them for the wifi connection. She currently owns a windows vista laptop (her first PC) but she never uses it because it's hard for her to configure wifi at home and at work and Mac is too expensive. She doesn't quite like the word processor because it's too complicated for her (too many features). She only knows how to use gmail and how to search. And that's all she'll ever want a computer for.

So, as soon as those Chromebooks start selling for less than $300 (and if they sell with a built-in 3G subscription), I'll buy one for her. She'll get instant access to her Google account, including gmail, gtalk, google search and the internet. She'll eventually learn how to use google docs. No worries, no hassles for her thanks to the *stateless* hardware of the Chromebook. The fact that the hardware is *stateless* means that zero-configuration is required. Zero as in nada or zilch. That is what I call disruptive computing.

My late 2003 vision seems to materialize: Chrome OS is here!

I transcribe here, literally, the kick-off post of Webtop mania, to remind our (few but dearest) readers what this blog is all about, what's his purpose and why it exists in the first place.

What is the webtop mania? (October 18th 2006)

Consider the following sequence of words:
desktop
laptop
palmtop
...
What is the next element of the sequence?

This little riddle stumbled upon my subconscient about three years ago as I was striving to finish my course by making good use of available services and technologies throughout the web. I had just recently acquired a laptop (wifi ready!) and I was enjoying the euphoria of lap-mobility, using it in airplanes, in trains, at work and at home (I was using a lot the train back then). I was using ftp and remote shells to develop and save some of my work, although in a rudimentar fashion compared to the high end OS graphical environment at the time (I had windows XP). However my little knowledge and experience gave me but a frustrating experience. Once from a cybercafé I couldn't update an important word document from my usb pen because of versioning compatibility, it made a mess between file formats conversion. I even had a hard time to use my university ssh-based mail. This was because I would use a highly customized system. My reach in mobility was simply stuck in my laptop. And I thought: "hmmm... There's got to be a smart way to stuck out from a physical platform, I should be able to edit my word documents from a cybercafe,I don't expect to run Matlab or Mathematica from there, but at least an office document I should!"
Then, along the following last years, I had the opportunity and time to familiarize myself with ides, tag-semantics such as html, kml, xml and xsl, documents repository systems, databases, servers of http, jsp, mail and ftp, scripting languages such as cgi, php and perl, other OSes such as linux and macOS. This and an awe around Google Earth and Google search engine made me think of all the possibilities of formidable tools that the web could produce. Once I realized that the web-based email, though slower, standed more mobile-proof than outlook, or ssh based emails, I simply extrapolated the web-based relevance of applications in the present and near-future world. The limiting bandwidth had just been cut short and the high speed internet was now universally available in my world ... Thus I previewed the webtop!

I did this transcription because, more than six(!) years later, finally my vision starts to materialize. The subtle changing shift in the winds of time that I could felt way back in 2003, today, has finally materialized and other big players, like Google, have hasted their sails for it. They thus released the Chrome OS.

I leave you with the already well-known demo video and some links to what are other techies' thoughts over it. For me, it's needless to say, Google gets the webtop mania. Better than I. And for that, I'm thankfull.

• Gizmodo - What Google Needs for the Chrome OS To Succeed
  
• StayNAlive - All Your OS Are Belong to Google – Why Aren’t We Worried?
  
• Daring Fireball - Chrome OS Will Not Support Hard Disk Drives
  
• Chrome OS: Is It Really An Operating System?
  
• Webmania 2.0 - Google Chrome OS – O que é?

Is Cinch really better than Twitter and Evernote?

There were a lot of reactions around the last post on Cinch. And some folks might be curious about the service and the iPhone app. So I decided to write a follow-up post (the title is possibly borrowed from someone else by now).

Cinch, the iPhone app, allows to share audio-notes taken with the iPhone, complemented with a photo and a 140 chars message. Cinch also works with regular mobile phones as you can call a Cinch number and record your audio-notes. Your "cinches" are forwarded on RSS stream and they'll pop-up in your Google reader, Twitter and facebook stream in near real-time (as good as it gets - except for Google reader, as I don't think they use the pubsubhubhub tech, yet). In the last post, I said that it was better than Twitter and Evernote combined together :) So, is it?

First of all, the good news: I may find it absolutely more interesting than Twitter, but it doesn't "replaces" Twitter. In fact, it *feeds* Twitter with more interesting links to rich audio content. It also feeds your facebook stream. I can say that I got more reactions than average over at Facebook because of my cinches. And *that* is what matters to me.

Second, Cinch *is* a lot better than Evernote for audio notes. The iPhone app just works, whereas Evernote's iPhone app has bugs and failed on me several times in the past. The sound quality is way better than Evernote. However, I wouldn't mind if my cinches were duplicated on Evernote's servers. In fact, I wish they were...

Finally, Cinch is *well-implemented*. They did it the right way. I won't enter on details, but I know a good implementation when I see one. (Ok, I wouldn't have implemented the front-end in asp, but that's me...).

Thus, to sum up, Cinch is for audio-notes what Twitter is for 140chars text messages. Cinch is not a reason to ditch Twitter (au contraire) nor is it to ditch Evernote (I duplicate all my flickr uploads on Evernote using this custom workflow I made with Tarpipe).

So, the only "bad news" is that you're going to spend 20 minutes to try it out. If you've got an iPhone and if you're an iphone app addict, it sure is definitively worth it. Best app in its category. If you don't like texting your tweets (like myself) you may consider calling the Cinch number (us only) and voice them (though Twitterfone is perhaps better for small audio-notes).

Here are my Cinches: I cinch mostly to share all my sound and visual experiences, like music concerts, new city sounds, strange eery magical atmospheres, friends chatter and laughter... all those beautiful sensorial experiences that a simple photo just cannot keep. I do it for me, for my friends, for my future memories of my past :D

Disclosure: I have no connections with CinchCast or BlogTalkRadio. First, I liked their app. Then, I enjoyed some amount of feedback from the Silicon Valley tech-sphere with the last post. So, I try to keep it up =)