Respectable battery life, a poor terminal, and an infuriating trackpad. And John Resig is spoiled from owning a Mac.
Battery life is good to hear, terminal strikes me as "fail" (seriously. Developer mode. It should be as developer-friendly as possible, no? That means a good terminal application.), trackpad could be fixed through software, and who isn't (who has one)? [edit: correction: there's a non-developer-mode terminal, which is this one. Developer mode has SSH key abilities & others]
Not too surprising, given that this is an early-release test. But in that way it's similar to many other Google products; first version is crap but interesting enough to use, and in time (if not dropped) it tends to take over everything because it gets better and better. It seems to me this might take off whenever they put out offline versions of GMail and Docs. Until then, it's of limited (though interesting) use and most definitely not for everyone.
I've since been able to flip over into developer mode (you have to toggle a physical switch to enable it). It gives you a proper shell (which allows you to install an SSH key) but beyond that there doesn't seem to be much else that you can do (it's not obvious to me how you would install a package or compile code).
Though I think you're misunderstanding this machine as both a developer machine and something more than just a browser. Chrome is really the only app. That I can get to a terminal at all is a huge surprise to me, I don't believe this is supposed to compete with normal laptops as dev machines. I didn't expect this to have ssh installed at all.
As a matter of fact I can't figure out how to (or if I can) copy/paste in the shell, I scp'd that somewhere else so I could post it.
Oh, I fully understand the disconnect there. I'm just interested in how far this thing can be bent, and how easily. And this was the first thing I came up with, however poor it may be.
Thanks much for the (sc)paste!
edit: wow, there's not much there, is there? The only text editor I see is qemacs, which I've never touched: http://man.cx/qemacs and no clue on copy / paste.
I'm guessing that the lack of proper ssh key support is part of the desire to have nothing permanent on the device. Since one of the security aspects is to make it so that if you lose the machine, you have no risk of compromising your information. Having your private key stored on the machine kind of defeats that purpose.
That being said: when I was playing with dev builds on my netbook last year, the first thing I did was put my private key on it.
That's a very good point, I hadn't thought of it from that perspective.
Though you could refer to SSH keys which are on a USB drive, fully protecting your info if your laptop is lost (as long as your drive wasn't plugged in)...
Respectable battery life, a poor terminal, and an infuriating trackpad. And John Resig is spoiled from owning a Mac.
Battery life is good to hear, terminal strikes me as "fail" (seriously. Developer mode. It should be as developer-friendly as possible, no? That means a good terminal application.), trackpad could be fixed through software, and who isn't (who has one)? [edit: correction: there's a non-developer-mode terminal, which is this one. Developer mode has SSH key abilities & others]
Not too surprising, given that this is an early-release test. But in that way it's similar to many other Google products; first version is crap but interesting enough to use, and in time (if not dropped) it tends to take over everything because it gets better and better. It seems to me this might take off whenever they put out offline versions of GMail and Docs. Until then, it's of limited (though interesting) use and most definitely not for everyone.