Is it possible to install WhatPulse as an app on a Chromebook? If not, will there ever be an app for it? I am thinking of getting Chromebook, and I want to know if I will be able to use WhatPulse.
I’d go so far as to say not a chance for at least a while - The development is purely focused on the three major operating systems at the moment, and until that’s done I can’t see anyone working on the less-known/used ones.
A Chromebook is indeed a very nice thing to have (8 seconds cold boot time – just wow). Based on what I know about the OS, though, I believe there’s no way to properly implement WhatPulse for it. This is on purpose, it’s part of the security design of these things.
The only way I can think of would be as a Chrome extension, but (1) I’m not sure whether extensions can place global or almost-global keyhooks, and (2) Chrome extensions are written in JavaScript, so they’re open source by nature, and there’d be no way to prevent cheaters from modifying it and pulsing arbitrarily high scores. Oh, and (3) we’d need to have a way to prevent it from running on regular desktop Chrome, where another WP client might be active at the same time.
It would be nice if I was wrong – if anyone wants to create a prototype / proof-of-concept, I’m happy to have a look and see if we can make an official client out of it.
If extensions could be global, maybe someone could make the extension detect the operating system and if it is using anything other than Chrome, it would not work. I’m not sure how to get around the open source, though.
Edit: Apps can be global. Dropbox and StumbleUpon are global.
[quote=jmrk]A Chromebook is indeed a very nice thing to have (8 seconds cold boot time – just wow). Based on what I know about the OS, though, I believe there’s no way to properly implement WhatPulse for it. This is on purpose, it’s part of the security design of these things.
The only way I can think of would be as a Chrome extension, but (1) I’m not sure whether extensions can place global or almost-global keyhooks, and (2) Chrome extensions are written in JavaScript, so they’re open source by nature, and there’d be no way to prevent cheaters from modifying it and pulsing arbitrarily high scores. Oh, and (3) we’d need to have a way to prevent it from running on regular desktop Chrome, where another WP client might be active at the same time.
It would be nice if I was wrong – if anyone wants to create a prototype / proof-of-concept, I’m happy to have a look and see if we can make an official client out of it.[/quote]
My Linux desktop does a cold boot in about ~3 seconds on my SSD. :3 Sometimes it’s an instantaneous post from BIOS. x3
@Carbon: What?
I’ve never seen a desktop PC where even the BIOS alone would take less than, say, 20 seconds to boot up to the point where you get to actually read anything off the hard disk. Some laptop BIOSes are a little faster, but 3 seconds? No way.
To clarify, by “cold boot”, I mean from fully shut down and switched off to working system. No suspend, standby, hibernation or anything like that – those are nice ways to save some time in certain circumstances, but they’re not what I’m comparing to here. We could also talk about “reboot time” if that makes things clearer. It’s been a while since I’ve watched a Chromebook reboot, but I think that process takes about 10 seconds or so, maybe 12.
I consider any computer, no matter which OS, that (re)boots in less than a minute to be insanely fast (in terms of boot time); and it’s almost impossible to get such times without an SSD. A Chromebook just laughs at that 1-minute mark, and costs not all that much more than an SSD…
Of course there are other differences. A regular operating system does a lot more stuff both at boot time and after, and there are advantages to that. My primary OS is not ChromeOS, and that won’t change anytime soon. But as an additional device, just to quickly look something up on the web, check your email from the couch, show a YouTube video at the dinner table, or similar exercises, having a Chromebook in the house is a pretty neat idea 
After looking at my new chromebook’s file system, I realized that Chrome is just a version of Linux. It has a Linux kernel and all the same directories I’m used to seeing on Ubuntu. There is a version of Whatpulse that works on Linux, so why can’t it be recoded into Java to work on Chrome?
…
What bobL said.
Also, let’s get a few more facts straight:
- “Chrome” is a browser.
- “ChromeOS” is basically Chrome + a very stripped-down and locked-down GNU/Linux core system + some custom bits and pieces. It is very much different from Ubuntu, even though they share some of their basic building blocks.
- As I’ve said before, ChromeOS doesn’t support arbitrary additional programs such as the WhatPulse Linux client.
- Java has nothing to do with it. (JavaScript is very different, despite the similarity in the name.)
- It’s not a matter of “recoding” something in another language. You’d have to completely reinvent and redesign all aspects of the program, from how you’re getting the key presses to how you’re displaying whatever you want to display on the screen. If it’s possible at all (I don’t see how), the amount of possible code re-use would be close to zero.