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Creating your first chrome app on a Chromebook

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Doing development on Chromebook usually means developing online. There are a lot of sites around for that. But with the APIs getting more mature, its just a matter of time before someone builds a kick-ass IDE which runs natively on Chromebooks without network connectivity. One such tool which I've been exploring for a last few weeks is from Google and called " Chrome Dev Editor " If you have never built and run a chrome app or extension, I'll show you how to do this in 3 easy steps.     Step 1 Launch the app and click on the "+" button to add a new project. Pick a project name and select "JavaScript Chrome App" in the drop down menu.       Step 2 Notice how it automatically adds the minimum code required for it to run. This will be the template you are going to work with. You are almost done, but lets review the files in there to understand why they are there.   manifest.json - This is the most important file. Modify the app name, version number

New York sky line

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I don't travel to NYC often, but when I do, I look for the days when there are no snow storms.  

The mobile revolution in numbers..

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I'll be honest. I didn't know who or what "Mary Meeker" was until last year. The data I saw then and what I saw in her latest post is beyond fascinating. She (and her team) has put a lot of effort in collecting and analyzing interesting trends from all around the world. The end result is a deck like this one . I'm sure different people see different things in the deck... I picked the two slides below as the ones most interesting to me. The first one is about tablet growth. If you had time to see just one slide, this one would be the one. It shows the trend around what people are buying. Its very clear that notebooks took over desktops in 2009, but what I didn't know was that tablets are exploding in a way no one anticipated. It should be noted that average lifetime of the desktop is way longer than notebooks, and tablets/smartphones probably have the shortest lifespan. But even if you take that into account, the growth of tablets/phones is nothing short of a r

The end of spring..

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 Took this shot a couple of weeks ago using my Nexus 5.      

Share Quickly: Taking screenshots of a chrome tab and publishing it online

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It has been a while since I got my hands dirty writing code. So here is a tool I cooked up last night. Share Quickly  is a chrome extension which takes a screenshot of the active tab and uploads it to a public website which makes screenshot sharing a one click task. I plan to make these images disappear from cache after some time to save on storage... haven't figure out how to expose that yet. The files are hosted on Google's App engine using cloud storage and the front end for that service is on Google Compute engine. I choose to write this in PHP instead. Interestingly the backend storage is not limited to images only. You can actually use  http://sharequickly.appspot.com/  to save and share arbitrary pieces text. Note that none of this is pretty, so be warned. Feature requests and general comments are welcome.

Chrome devices for everyone...

I compiled a list below of all the chrome devices which are sold today or were sold in the past. I did this primarily to understand the device trend. Interestingly the average price for a chrome device is around $340 US on Amazon 16 GB Flash is most common, but some devices have 32 GB option There is only one device I know off which comes with a real harddisk, but that's not listed in this chart. 2GB RAM is still popular, but more of the recent devices come with 4GB Average weight is around 3 pounds Average screen size is just over 12 inches for laptops Average battery duration is around 7.5 hours on single charge Note : This information was collected from various sources (including wikipedia and  chromium.org  and Amazon website) and may have unintentional errors. URL: http://goo.gl/zyTBqN

The trouble with ubiquitous computing

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The idea of "ubiquitous computing" most people dream about doesn't usually include the troubles of patching them every week. It doesn't even mention that there would be new bugs found daily and that most of the fixes would be available weeks if not months after they were discovered. Windows XP has been in news recently because Microsoft has finally pulled support for this aging OS. 30% of all active desktops  are still on XP and now we know of a  new security bug , which would never get fixed for these users. XP may eventually become the epitome of unpatched buggy software because of the visibility this issue got, but I feel this may just be the tip of the iceberg. For every XP out there, I bet there is one or more unpatched networking device just waiting for someone to exploit it, and this number is growing very fast. Some of these bugs are just that... bugs, but I suspect most of them are due to  less then reputable code/design quality.  Its a wild-wild-west out th