I read a great interview with Jerry Lawson, video game and computer industry pioneer, who recently passed away. Mr. Lawson was a black engineer in an industry that was almost entirely white. In his interview, not only does he talk about a fascinating period of time (interviewing Steve Jobs for an engineering position, the first computers, the first video games), but he also shares his perspective on the role of race in engineering careers.

I’ve had my Google CR-48, the reference implementation notebook for Chrome OS, for a week and a half now. You can read my earlier reviews here and here.

This is day two of using Google’s Chrome OS reference netbook, the CR-48. I obtained mine by signing up for the pilot program. As of yesterday, they were not only accepting applications, but still soliciting them through Chrome, so my guess is that more are still available if you want one.

I’m continuing to be eager to use it, although I’ve started to notice some of the flaws.

Here’s an example: Google promised an instant-on ability, and in fact, the screen is instantly available, and the current page is display within a second of opening the notebook. But then it’s got to negotiate for wifi access, and that takes time. Finding the router and getting an IP address seems to take about five to ten seconds or so. By this time, I’ve tried loading a new page typically, and I get an error that the page is not available. Then I need to refresh once the wifi connection is established. It’s not that any other notebook is faster at this, it’s just that the promise of instant availability raises my expectations.

The other issue is a small cosmetic issue. The matte black finish is cool. They could have called it an Ono-Sendai cyberspace deck, and it would have felt right. On the other hand, the CR-48, slid into the same laptop bag that my MacBookPro slides into, comes out covered with dusk and glitter. The MacBookPro comes out (looking) clean. Apparently I need to get a new laptop bag.

This are small, trivial issues.

The bigger issue right now is that I’m feeling the lack of a taskbar/doc/start menu/application menu. When I have new email, it’s not exactly obvious, because there’s no email indicator. When I want to launch an application, I have to open a new tab, and then remember whether the web page I’m looking for is a bookmark or an application shown on the new tab menu. It’s vaguely unsettling. Somehow it’s easier to get to where I want on either Android, iOS, Windows, or Mac than in Chrome – but perhaps this is just settling into the OS. (Woah, when did I become a user of five different operation systems? Talk about fragmentation after years of consolidation.)

The other issue is that in a desktop OS environment, we’re used to application menus and tool buttons appearing in a consistent location: either at the top of the application window or at the upper left hand corner of the screen. Either way, the functionality is accessible from a fixed (rather than relative) geographical location. That’s important, because it allows us to use muscle memory to invoke functionality rather than cognitive processing. By comparison, web applications have (1) no standardization on where and how their functionality is invoked, and (2) it’s located in a relative location within a browser window. If I have scrolled the browser window, then the menus and buttons of the application have moved. The application controls and the application content scroll together. This is the opposite of every desktop application, in which the application controls remain constant while the content scrolls.

Perhaps I’ll adapt, but for the moment, it feels like the chrome os user interface metaphor has a few gaps. And that’s more than just a stability issue, it’s a usability issue. It’s not traditionally where Google shines. I hope they get some help. Maybe there’s some small company out there that’s developed the perfect user interface for browsers, and Google can acquire them.

Here’s what I really liked so far day:

• Long battery life and lightweight: it was easy to carry around, and I didn’t need to bring my charger to work.
• Nearly-instant on. It may take a while to negotiate wifi, but it’s still about 100x faster than Windows, and about 4x faster than Mac OSX.
• The fonts: I’m really digging the selection of fonts.
• Form factor: great combination of keyboard size, screen size. Not too big or small.

What I used the CR-48 for:

• writing blog posts
• checking email
• online shopping
• facebook
• trying to watch youtube video (didn’t work)
• playing games
• writing a few documents using Google docs

When I got home last night there was an unmarked box waiting for me. Uncertain of whether it was a gift for me, or a gift I bought for my family, I opened it carefully. I didn’t recognize the interior box, so I asked my wife to open it for me. Ten minutes later, she was still puzzling over what it was. So I came over and let out a yelp – It was a CR-48 – the Chrome OS reference notebook by Google.

I hurriedly unboxed it, and it’s understand why my partner was confused. This notebook is completely unmarked. There is not a single logo, lettering, or marking with the exception of the plain indications on the keyboard. The matte black body makes it look and feel like something out of an early William Gibson novel.

It took about two minutes to get the battery inserted, power cord plugged in, and about ten minutes to clear enough kids’ stuff away to find a space to put it down and play with it.

If you watched the Chrome OS press event last week, the startup and login experience is exactly as shown. It takes a second for the notebook to start up. On my particular model, the top quarter inch of the display flickers for about 15 seconds. I’m not sure if this is a screen warmup issue, or something else.

Using my typical web apps, such as Gmail, iGoogle, and Facebook, the notebook is speedy, and delivers an experience similar to Chrome on the Mac or Windows. The fonts are somewhat different, but pleasant. They seem to be optimize for good screen readability and compactness.

The experience slowed down a bit when I tried to use YouTube and Pandora. Pandora definitely worked, but it slowed down the machine. The flash player crashed a few times. (How about a native HTML5 app Pandora?)

The trackpad, as mentioned elsewhere, is a little wonky. Regular left clicks work fine, and tracking is pretty good most of the time. Right clicks and scrolling, both two fingered gestures, are hard to get to work. I find it works better if I separate my fingers slightly – whereas the Mac doesn’t need that. I find I use alt-click when I need to right-click.

The browser has crashed a half dozen times so far – it’s never happened during use of an existing tab, but it’s happened when opening new tabs.

The hardware itself has been admired by everyone who has seen it, even though the idea of the Chrome OS itself has been puzzling to about half the people who have seen it. “What advantage does this have over running Chrome on a regular PC?” is a question I’ve heard a few times.

I think the answer is that you don’t have the headaches of a regular PC. No OS updates to manage, no security holes, no complicated settings. Whether the long battery life (supposedly 8+ hours) is a function of the hardware or of efficiencies gained from doing away with a traditional OS, I don’t know.

Part of the deal with Google was promising to use this as my main computer. The biggest challenge is figuring out a web based replacement for Scrivener so I can continue working on my novel. I’ve used Google docs before, and it’s almost there. The main shortcoming is the difficulty of organizing the chapters and scenes. I almost imagine that this could be done as a layer on top of Google Docs, since individual documents could be used for each scene. Then I would need the ability to search across scenes, and compile the set of documents into a single .doc or .pdf for sharing.

Ultimately, this is the biggest challenge for Chrome OS: not whether the OS is stable enough or fast enough. Google can do that. The biggest challenge is whether browser apps can become good enough replacements for desktop apps. Microsoft Word has 15+ years of development behind it, and Google Docs has a couple of years. That’s a big different to make up.

Mobile apps have had the benefit that they’ve been focused on small, simple tasks. Useful mobile apps can be written in a weekend. Nobody expects to edit a novel on their phone, but they do expect to edit a novel on their computer. Can useful browser apps be written for the kinds of heavy duty tasks that people want to do?

I hope so, because I’m enjoying the CR-48 so far, and it’d be awesome to be able to make it work as my primary machine.

I was recently pondering the interplay between Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Microsoft’s strengths have traditionally been in the software realm, and Google’s in the web realm. Apple’s strengths have been in delivering great user experience and design, great operating systems, and hardware.

Google has been moving into Microsoft’s territory by offering cloud based applications. Over time, Google Docs and Gmail are becoming more competitive, and hence more of a threat to Microsoft. Microsoft has responded by moving into online search and offering their own cloud based office applications.

Cloud-based applications have some serious benefits including the ability to access the applications from anywhere, ready access to data from wherever you happen to be, secure backup of data, and easier sharing of information. But users do have to make some tradeoffs. Frequently the user experience and features of those cloud applications are nowhere comparable to what you’d find in the equivalent desktop app. (Gmail and Google Docs have only the most rudimentary formatting for example.) But that user experience will improve over time.

Where does Apple fit into the picture? I realized that Apple could offer some very useful cloud-like benefits by building on top of their expertise (great devices, great operating systems). Let me paint a picture for you, using three complementary features that together create a great experience and offer many of the benefits of cloud apps, without having a cloud.

Apple’s OS X is built on top of Unix, and an integral part of Unix is X11 (pronounced X eleven), the windowing system that allows applications to display graphical windows. A great feature of X11, little known outside of technical users, is that it can be used to run an application on one computer, and display the window (output) on another computer. However, this is typically hard to do. It’s not wrapped up in a nice little graphical user interface.

Imagine if Apple modified the application switcher (Apple-Tab, equivalent to Alt-Tab on Windows), so that it showed you not just the applications running on that Macintosh, but also those applications running on any Mac you happened to be logged into. You’d get something like this:

Above the line, you see two computers. An application is running on computer #1, and displaying the GUI of that app on the same computer. On computer #2, the same user is logged in, and they run the app switcher. They see the applications running on computer #1 in the app switcher, just like any locally running apps. The user can select the app, and have the GUI moved from computer #1 to computer #2.

With this ability, Apple users be running an application at home, and access it seamlessly from work. Or be running an application on their desktop PC, and access it seamlessly from their iPad.

Now let’s talk about distributed file systems. Another benefit that the Unix operating system has over Windows is that it is used far more extensively for high performance computing, such as running weather simulations. In this situations, clusters of Unix computers work together on computationally difficult tasks. In order to share massive data sets among computer, these Unix computer run distributed file systems that allow any computer that is part of the cluster to access any file, regardless of exactly where it lives. Many distributed file systems also incorporate data redundancy so that if any one hard drive fails, the data exists in at least one other location. There are several different distributed file systems for Unix.

Here’s a picture:

In this example, computer #1 and #2 both are part of the same distributed file system. As a user, if you use Finder (the equivalent of Windows Explorer) to look at the file system, it appears that File A is present, even though it’s actually on computer #1. It would be possible to also choose to incorporate true cloud storage services, so that for a small cluster of computers, data redundancy is guaranteed by being replicated seamlessly in the cloud.

Just as we integrated app management into the application switch to make X11 more palatable to the masses, Apple would need to integrate distributed file systems into the out of box experience and user management aspects of OSX, so that users would not need to think about distributed file systems, but could instead just enjoy the benefit of seeing one hard drive that contained all their files, and which appeared identical, regardless of which computer they were accessing it from.

The third and final feature that brings cloud-like benefits to Apple would be a browser-based interface to user’s computer. Browser based versions of X11 windows managers already exist, and by integrating user account management and secure connections, users of Apple computers could enjoy accessing their applications and data from any web browser. Imagine, for example, going to apple.com/mymac, and then accessing your Mac directly. This can already be accomplished, by some extent through solutions like GoToMyPc.com, but through OS and X11 optimizations, Apple could probably deliver a better experience. It would like similar to the first diagram, except now the experience is running within the web browser: