OUT THE WINDOW

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 283/ 9th February 2018 09:38:21

A few days ago my Chromebook told me it would like to reboot in order to update its operating system. I‘d just made a cup of tea at the time (Bai Mu Dan if you’re interested). I hit the power button and nervously watched the progress bar – a habit picked up from 30 years of Windows use – and it finished updating while the tea was still hot. With the reboot completed a pop-up informed me that I could now download and run Android apps on the Chromebook. That was worth another biscuit (Biscoff Lotus if you’re interested). 

Running Android apps on the Chromebook had been an ambition for most of the previous year, but up until now it had involved techie adventures in developer mode that I didn’t feel like attempting. The first driver of this ambition was a need to program in Python on the machine, satisfied instantly by downloading the Android version QPython3. It compiled and ran everything I’ve written under Windows, the only change required being to prefix any file paths with “/storage/emulated/0/” (of which more later). 

Almost as strong was a desire for certain Android apps I’d come to depend upon, like the PC-Pro-Award-winning Citymapper which enables me to navigate through London with unprecedented ease. I had tried the browser-based version for Chrome, but it was so inferior to the Android app in UI terms, particularly the interactivity of the maps, that I preferred to use it on my phone or tablet. And that brings me to the main point of this column: just like Windows native applications, Android apps nowadays exploit the hardware (especially screen real-estate) so much better than browser-based versions that there’s no contest. 

Another application I use every day is Spotify, on which I listen to music at home via Windows or Chromebook, while walking on heath or park on my phone. But until this update I had three different versions of the Spotify client, differing from one another in various ways, some subtle, some downright infuriating. The Windows version is still the most complete in that it supports playlist folders to organise my scores of lists, and also drag-and-drop to rearrange these folders and their contents. The Android version has folders that aren’t drag-and-drop, but does support a new UI with a taskbar at the bottom that’s easier to use on small phone screens. The browser version I’d been using on the Chromebook is a nightmare that doesn’t support folders at all and steamrollers them into un-navigably flat lists which aren’t even complete: the Artists tab only displays a fraction of what’s there. Spotify is nowadays ambivalent about playlists and deprecates them in favour of its newer, non-hierarchical Your Music (Save| Songs| Artists| Albums) system, hence this bodge which I thoroughly enjoyed uninstalling.

The combination of Google Contacts, Calendar and the ever-increasingly-wonderful Google Keep ensures that all my appointments, addresses, notes and other important data are always automatically synced between Windows, Chrome and Android machines – I can even do voice dictation on my phone and have it there waiting on the desktop when I get home. 

So what about writing? Well, the answer is that I’m writing this column in Google Docs. Running Android means that I could now have Microsoft Word, but in truth I’d stopped using MS Office even under Windows several years ago, in favour of LibreOffice. Google Docs does everything I need except for its lack of simple macros. Under Windows I used an external app Macro Express, plus a few Word Basic scripts. I’ve found an almost complete replacement in a Chrome extension called ProKeys that stores ‘snippets’ of text, complete with placeholders and automatic date and time stamping, which covers 90% of what I want to do. It can’t do my text editing macros – swapping pairs of letters or words under the cursor – but I can’t be bothered to learn Google Docs’ JavaScript API and will do without. 

Is there a downside? Well yes, the confusion of three different file locations, the default My Drive in the cloud, the small local Download drive and a completely separate local Android drive. Apps mostly hide this from you, but it really is time Google did that long-promised merger of Android and ChromeOS. As a grizzled pioneer of the personal computer revolution I’ll never be entirely happy having everything in someone else’s cloud and will always want local copies of current work and vital data, so here’s a suggestion. A merged OS (ChromDroid?) might have a file attribute that takes these three values:

  l = local only
  c = cloud only
  s = local first, then sync to cloud

Give me that and Windows would go right, er, out the window.