Friday, February 26, 2010

Exploding Flavia

Dang Flavia packets keep exploding on us. Maybe time to try another
brand. Would be nice to have compostable pods. Suggestions?

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Browser Based Apps for Google Tablet



Google seemed to try to toss a bit of cold water on Apple's iPad announcement with a me too announcement of a Google Tablet.

One thing that caught my attention though was:
Google is taking a different approach with Chrome OS. Instead of programs running straight on the computer's hardware and its underlying Linux operating system, Chrome OS applications run directly in the browser. What's similar to the iPad, though, is that both have somewhat of an applications head start compared with a computing platform that's starting from scratch: the iPad can run existing iPhone apps, and Chrome OS can run existing Web applications such as Google Docs
This reminds me of the Native Client project. It would be interesting to see Google take a web app approach to the tablet. Of course Apple launched the iPhone without an app store and initially pitched the idea that all apps could just be web apps. Of course today no one thinks of web apps as real iPhone apps. (Except maybe the Google Voice folks.)

Maybe the Google tablet could just leverage NaCl apps as a way to jump start a gPad device instead of the more complicated and heavy handed process that is involved in running an app store. After all, this is similar to the way the iPhone got started. Of course NaCl apps could do a lot more than the Javascript web apps of the iPhone 1.0 days.