90% of what people do now is done within a web browser?

I was debating with a friend the merit of a Chromebook (it's really debate for the sake of debate 'coz both of us are not inclined to buy one) I think there's a market for Chromebook because a lot can be done inside a browser these days. It has been more than a decade after Larry Ellison was pitching his concept of "Network Computing" that depends on technology like Java Applet. With today's JavaScript-based technology you could provide very rich UI in your Web apps. Then the next day I read this article "Six things that make open source a no-brainer for your company" The author wrote

90% of what people do now is done within a web browser. Let's face it, most end users today could get by with a Chromebook and still be able to get their jobs done.

If you scroll down to the comment section, you would see two comments are against this point. One said the author lacked stats to back up this argument. (One actually said "browser is a bad terminal" but he agreed he was old-school so let's leave him alone) I gave this some thought and I think we could come up with a list of what people usually do with their computer and decide whether 90% of the list could be done in a web browser! Here is the list on the top of my head:
- social networking
- web browsing (duh!)
- messaging
- office productivity (word processing/spreadsheet/presentation)
- media consumption (browsing photo, streaming music and video)
- media editing (picture/audio/video)

A web browser can certainly handle the Top 5. In fact, Google Doc is so convenient that I'd rather use it than M$ Office. The last one is debatable: for simple manipulation like making a collage of pictures, applying a filter, trimming a video or adding a sound track, web apps are good enough. What a browser cannot handle are the more sophisticated tasks like decoding a DVD or multi-track recording. So I think it's fair to say it's 25% capable for the last task. 5.25/6 = 87.5% which rounds up to 90! (In fact, if you just consider the time one typically spent on these tasks, it's certainly > 90% within a web browser!)

As a side note, even though I am no fan of Chromebook, I can't deny it's a successful product. From this article:

Amit Singh, the president of Google for Work, discussed the vision of Chrome for work and said that Chromebooks are the number one selling device on Amazon and number one selling device for education as well.

And this is from a non-Google source: Top 3 holiday computers sold by Amazon were Chromebooks. 

Flawed Google Drive

Isn't it awesome that someone provides a free service that let user edit Microsoft Office-compatible files (and include most functionality that people actually use) anywhere anytime when the user gets online? You know I'm talking about Google Drive (formerly known as Google Doc) I use it a lot but it has a really annoying bug: when you pick a cell on a spreadsheet, sometimes it will erase the content of the cell without you telling it to. Apparently I am not the only one who ran into this (see this post on Google's forum) Fortunately, Google Drive keeps revisions of files after every edit. According to Google's support doc, there is a menu option to access these revisions. Well, support was wrong! The option is NOT there. To see your revisions, you need to click on that "All changes saved in Drive" text instead, which is totally not intuitive.

You might say I'm nitpicking on something that is free. Maybe I am but this is from a company known for hiring the best talent in the industry! Anything less than perfect is unacceptable :P

My Android 4.0 Experience

As I mentioned in my previous post about my Android tablet, my plan was to upgrade it to 4.0 after using it with 2.3 for a while. I found the post about Android 4.0 beta on the forum on Teclast's official website and there's a link to download the RAR file. Un-rar the file and it contains instructions as well as binaries for the upgrade.

So, what do I like about Android 4.0 (beta)? To be honest, this doesn't seem to be a "must-have" upgrade for the time being (However, I could imagine a few years down the road, new apps won't run on 2.3 anymore. Just like a lot of iOS app these days requires 3.1 or even 4.0 or above.) The browser seems smoother and supports tabbed browsing (it's harder to switch between opened "windows" in the 2.3 browser) In addition, it doesn't require another app to turn on Airplane mode like 2.3. It is part of the "Settings"

The biggest problem with this beta upgrade though, is that it doesn't include the Market (where we download Apps) The closest "replacement" for the Market is freewarelovers.com. I found quite a few APK (App installer files. Simply double click in File Manager and it will install the corresponding app) I got other APK by Googling. And here is what I have installed:
-Youtube
-Chinese News Online
-PalmBookReader: 直讀中文(cBook) for some reason doesn't work even though I found its APK. This is its replacement.
-Amazon Kindle
-Rhapsody: it is the official app for the music streaming service. At first, playback always fails after playing a few seconds of each track and will skip to the next one. The problem kinda went away after I checked the box Advanced Settings->Disable track pre-loading
-Pandora
-GoKeyboard: this is the input method that replaced "Baidu input" that came with the tablet originally on 2.3. Not an exact replacement though because it uses Cangjie (倉頡) instead of hand writing recognition.
-XiiaLive Lite
-Facebook

Hopefully Teclast will release an "official" non-beta Android 4.0 upgrade that includes the Market in the near future. In the mean time, I'll keep using the beta (unless there's an app I need so bad that I have to revert back to 2.3, which could be done by downloading the firmware from Teclast)

A few good Apps

Talking about Android Apps here, this is a followup to my previous post. I've tried many free Apps in the past 2 weeks, a lot of them are just so-so or simply doesn't work, here are a few useful ones:
1) BBC News Reader: an "unofficial" BBC News app that could download articles for offline viewing.
2) CNN News: another "unofficial" app that works offline
3) Chinese News Online (HK): this app offers many different Chinese newspapers.
4) MoboPlayer: this is for playing back video in MKV format, which the built-in movie player cannot handle.
5) XiiaLive Lite: this is for listening to free streaming radio from ShoutCast. To make it work, I have to change Settings->Advanced Users->Internal stream engine from 'Off' to 'On' though.

Finally, there are a few games I like:
- 麻將天下
- GoldMiner
- SpeedCar
- AirPenquin

一千港元樓下Android tablet使用報告

雖然不是Apple fans(對於此品牌過份及不合理地受歡迎簡直相當反感)不過一直以來卻是Apple iOS的用家。皆因在美國比Apple便宜很多很多，但功能夠用的電話及tablet，十分難找。回到香港情況很不同，一下機就看到由Twins做封面的E-Zone，介紹一千港元左右的7吋Android tablet。結果我買了最平，$899的Teclast P76ti，之後一期由官恩娜做封面的E-Zone正是用這部機示範升級Android 4.0。我已計劃升級至4.0，不過還是想使用2.3一段日子，將來可以作比較。

使用Android我是零經驗，一開始最不解的是最頂的Status bar，那些icons不是每個按下去都有用，每下載及安裝完App後出現的icons又不會自動消失，Googled才知可以把這個bar向下拉顯示icons代表的notifications，可按Clear清除 icons及notifications。另一個問題是輸入繁體中文，三個預裝的輸入法均找不到如何手寫並出繁體，想從Market安裝倉頡輸入法也找不到合適的。結果還是從預裝其中的Baidu輸入法入手，選取了常規設置中的簡繁轉換，即可手寫出繁體！（本文有一少半是在該tablet上手寫的）

尚未有解決辦法的問題還有一大堆，最嚴重的是battery life流失得頗快，不過幾小時已跌破15%出Notification，在Notification可打開Battery Usage，顯示75%用於Cell standby，問題是這是一部全無流動電話／上網功能的tablet，根本無需費電力於Cell radio之上，更麻煩的是除了該Notification無其他途徑打開Battery Usage！第一樣改的是關掉所有Mobile network的Data相關選項，下一步是嘗試幾個不同的App/widget，包括Juice Defender, NoBars, Battery Widget, Free Power Widget。Battery Widget能顯示Battery Usage頁；而Free Power Widget則可以將機轉至Airplane mode。雖然如此，電池還是流失得比期望中快，更令我失望的是Cell Standby維持在75%左右。

最後想提的問題是有些知名App，例如Rhapsody及QR Droid等，均無法在Market找到；即使裝了Market Enabler這個任用家選擇不同國家／電訊公司對應Market的App，還是找不到以上。裝了幾個免費QR Code Scanner都不能使用，可能和這部機只有一個前置鏡頭有關吧。

短短數天，也發掘了不少好App，讓我介紹／表揚下吧：
1)MapDroyd：可下載各地地圖，在機上離線(offline)使用。
2)ColorNote：簡單易用的寫note軟件。

至於Facebook, Yahoo Mail, GMail, Hotmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Amazon Kindle這些官方App，基本上都符合對那些公司的期望，沒有太多驚或喜。

Tech of the day: Google Chrome OS

Here is the simplest explanation: if your next computer runs Chrome OS, basically all it has is a browser.

It might sound strange for those who are used to old-school computing. However, this is my daughter's perception of computing:



Yes, it's a full-screen browser with a Google logo. (She made this at school without any input from me. )

If you think about how you use your computer, what applications are running most of the time, in addition to your browser? Maybe an e-mail client if you're not using web mail already? Maybe a word processor if you're not using Google Doc already? Maybe a media player if you're not consuming your media through the Flash-plugin of your browser already?

Suddenly Chrome OS is making a lot of sense huh?