Dick Pountain/Idealog 273/07 April 2017 11:19
Taking on a new computing platform was furthest from my mind, but it just happened anyway. I'm still basically wedded to Windows (albeit in v8.1) which I've wrestled to a stalemate that works well enough, only needing a reboot around once a quarter. For mobile I'm equally wedded to Android, via my 7" Asus tablet and HTC smartphone, with Google providing the interface between the three devices via Gmail, Contacts, Calendar and the beloved Keep, plus a little help from Dropbox. But now they are four...
PC Pro's publisher, Dennis Publishing Ltd, is on the last lap of preparing to move office, after 20+ years, from one 1930s block in London's Fitzrovia to a smaller one nearby. The new offices are extensively refurbished, very much in Silicon Valley style with lots of wide-open meeting and relaxation spaces and almost no horrid "open-plan" partitions. The CEO of Dennis Publishing is James Tye, whom regular readers may remember was once Editor of this very magazine and is hence very IT-savvy. When deciding the IT infrastructure for the new building, James chose one as radical as the interior design: as many staff as possible would be issued with Chromebooks in place of PCs, and the company LAN mostly replaced by The Cloud. There are necessary exceptions, like the accounts department which still needs its servers and software suite, and the designers who still need Macs to run Indesign, but the LAN will cease to be the main data store for everyone else, and most internal communication will be via Slack, Gmail and Google Drive.
They're buying upwards of 200 HP Chromebooks, whose 12+ hour battery life makes entirely wireless working feasible (the building has designed-in Wi-Fi with three incoming fibre lines for redundant backup) so people can work in places other than their desks. During a tour I expressed admiration for this brave leap into The Cloud, but though curious about Chromebooks, I stressed my Android/Windows devotion. James immediately and generously offered to loan me a Chromebook to see for myself whether they do everything I need.
What arrived wasn't an HP but a Dell 13, purchased during their evaluation phase, with a smart illuminated keyboard and magnesium chassis. Spec isn't everything in a Chromebook since much of the oomph is supplied at Google's end, but this one does look and feel good, with Gorilla Glass screen and trackpad that are noticeably superior to my own Lenovo Yoga. More disconcerting was turning it on to a practically blank screen. On closer inspection there was an unlabelled round icon in the lower left-hand corner that brought up the Google app launcher, familiar from my other devices, containing the Chrome browser, Gmail, Maps, Calendar , Translate, Keep and all. More surprisingly there were also several of my mobile apps - Guitarists Reference, GIF Maker, The Guardian and Pocket - that I'd assumed that as Android apps I'd have to replace. Of course all my calendar, contacts and Google documents were there already, which is the whole point.
After a couple of weeks I'm writing this on the Chromebook, in a Google Docs editor that’s just as responsive as the LibreOffice Word or TextPad I normally use. What still drives me mad though is the absence of a Delete key: you have to use Alt-Backspace which my brain knows but my fingers don’t (and perhaps never will). My brain on the other hand has difficulties with the Chrome OS file system, whose use of "download" and "upload" is the opposite of what I mean and deeply counterintuitive. I've put up a lot of my data on Google Drive, but still find it harder to navigate than Windows. I know I should just create and store all new stuff in the Cloud, but as a crusty product of the PC revolution I need to know stuff is on my local hard drive too.
What I do most, apart from writing, is process my photographs and program in Python, so how do these fare on Chromebook? After trying dozens of photo editor extensions, Sumo Paint has about 75% of the Photoshop Elements features that I need, though it's unfashionably Flash-based. As for Python, I can run small modules on the Skulpt interpreter Chrome extension, but it won't import all the modules of my large music project. For that I'd need a full Python 3.4 implementation which means either installing a Linux distro, or running Android apps (QPython) which the Dell won't do by default so I'd need to switch to unstable beta-developers' mode. Both are tech hassles I can do without. Google is really missing a trick with its failure properly to integrate Chrome OS with Android, because that combination could really give Apple and Microsoft sleepness nights.
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