61–70 of 169 posts
So, really, there's only two new features here: - Launch chrome apps directly from the desktop - Run chrome apps with out any of the browser toolbars Everything else is already possible in a regular chrome app.. Right?
"chromeless" Chrome windows have been in Chrome since the start as far as I can remember: Tools > Create Application Shortcuts.
So, really, there's only two new features here: - Launch chrome apps directly from the desktop - Run chrome apps with out any of the browser toolbars Everything else is already possible in a regular chrome app.. Right?
It looks like they open up APIs that otherwise wouldn't be exposed, like access to the shell and devices.
http://developer.chrome.com/apps/app_hardware.html
NPAPI has been available for awhile, too.. Not sure if that's what they're referring to when they say shell access.
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That's possible today - there are apps, that are basically web apps. But they usually offer inferior user experience. It's cheaper, but for the price of being worse than a native app. It's possible they will add support for other languages besides Java. Android is stuck with Java 6, which sucks...
That language will be web, I suspect. Perhaps Google will offer prerolled components specifically for Android? I strongly suspect that Chrome is the platform Google wants to push for client development now, with Android essentially as a shell for it. While web may arguably be "worse" on Android now, Google has a very large, talented engineering team who could change that relatively fast. Java is a dead end at this po…
I think that Java 8 is a great language, I like it a lot more than Javascript. Go would be great too.
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That actually makes a lot of sense given their Android KitKat tagline which is "It's our goal with Android KitKat to make an amazing Android experience available for everybody." Google has used Play Services to update Android in the background. Since they also own Chrome, the more apps that live within Chrome the more apps are up to date and out of reach of other companies who would use Android for them, notably Amaz…
It also means that many of these apps won't be usable by anyone running Android pre-4.0. Chrome launched with GoogleTV on Android 3, and that version doesn't auto-update, so it won't get apps.
"Chrome-specific code that means they won’t be able to run on other web browsers" This sounds vaguely familiar...
If Google waits for other browsers to offer the APIs it needs, Chrome apps won't happen for a long, long time.
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> -Previous installed chrome app matches the HTML5 api, the new chrome apps has a lot of restriction where you have to totally rewrite you code in terms of storage. i.e. Chrome.storage instead of localStorage; All chrome storage is async. I belive this is only localStorage right? (indexedDB is still available afaik) Firefox OS had mentions of disabling localStorage, its been a huge problem due to its synchronous API,…
indexedDB is available with an entirely async API. Bring on the callbacks!
However thats fine when you are building your own apps, but I meant as a long term solution to the web platform, if localStorage needs disabled on one platform in favour of a propietary API, maybe its best to replace it with a non proprietary web api
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Merge of the android and chrome/web platform, that would keep the strenths of both, is basically impossible. Why do you say that? Add some APIs to the Android browser, allow it to open apps full-screen... there doesn't seem to be much more to it than that.
That's really not too different from what it takes to package HTML5 code into Android apps already, with the same result of apps with UIs that feel foreign to the system. The trend is not towards HTML5, but actually away from it. Quite honestly the Chrome Mobile team are swimming against the tide on this.
That's quite a statement. The average Android app is already a UI nightmare that feels foreign to the system, I don't see how HTML is going to be somehow worse (especially when there would be a full set of HTML5 components to use).
One thing that I think is really cool about Chrome Apps is that you can write USB drivers in Javascript that will run on any platform that runs Chrome or Chromium. This means that if you want to make a hardware device that syncs with the cloud, all you have to do is write what is essentially a web app, and anyone with Windows, OS X, Linux, or Chrome OS can use your thing. I'm personally working on a Chrome SDR app fo…
Last time I looked into this stuff it's nontrivial to let arbitrary user-mode applications manipulate arbitrary USB devices on Windows, so I'd be impressed if they got it working in a secure fashion and deployed it to the open web.