A Week In The Cloud With JoliCloud And Chrome

I’ve spent more than a week using JoliCloud on my MacBook with Chrome and the results are in. Productivity and usability? Check. Accessibility. You bet. Work flow? That’s the thing I’m struggling with. JoliCloud and Chrome have provided me with a great user-experience with a plethora of features, but there’s still this need for an easily accessible file system and a few more-robust operating system features.

Let’s start with the pros. Boot time is about 30 seconds. Chrome loads in a fraction of a second. Snappy user experience all around. The minimalist nature of the OS keeps me focused on the page for writing and work. This has been my favorite “feature.” No updates, no flashy dock icons, no desktop clutter. I’ve got my nose to the grindstone nearly the whole time. Hasn’t been a single web page I couldn’t access, or a Flash video that didn’t work. Obviously HTML5 apps work quite well.

Running JoliCloud on the MacBook — despite not being an official Apple OS — managed my battery efficiently and gave me accurate percentages and times. All my peripherals (except the webcam) worked out of the box with no configuration required. That’s good work on JoliCloud’s part. Skype –despite being a local app — installed via JoliCloud’s app manager smoothly, as did Dropbox. JoliCloud web apps open in their own app-window, so you don’t have to have a million tabs open in one browser, or deal with toolbars you don’t need.

JoliCloud, unlike Chrome OS, is actually very usable off-line thanks to local apps like OpenOffice.

The Cons

Like I said, there’s a few features that I really need from a full operating system. Mac OS X has a keyboard shortcut for quick screen shot taking, and even Windows 7’s snipping tool is good enough in a pinch. But JoliCloud comes with a screen shot tool that is tucked away under “local apps” requiring a few clicks to get to — and after taking a screen shot — closes out the app, forcing you to re-open it for another screen shot. I take a lot of screen shots for the blogs I post.

But this was a minor nuisance compared to some of the deeper OS feature issues I had. On a few occasions, the WiFi would just not connect, without explanation. Despite finding manual configuration settings, I couldn’t connect JoliCloud to my iPhone WiFi for tethering. I expect some similar configuration hurdles with a Chrome OS netbook.

During the first few days, JoliCloud would not wake my MacBook out of a deep sleep, and one day, Chrome simply decided to crash the entire JoliCloud interface, leaving me to call up the terminal manually to reboot the system correctly.

Here’s the really big issue though, the one that I didn’t realize I cared so much about…

JoliCloud allows for you to poke around your local file system through a few mouse clicks, which has been helpful for saving text documents locally and moving them into and managing my Dropbox folder. Still, it’s a bit clunky. Windows get cluttered quickly with the only source of managing them being the overhead toolbar. No window snapping, no dock previews, etc… But what’s more concerning is that Chrome OS touts none of those most basic features.

Bottom line? I need control of my files. I need it badly. I need to mange windows more effectively, too.  Still, even with all that, I would say that 90% of my work flow was easily accomplished, but that extra 10% of room with a super-polished hard-drive loving OS really makes a nice cozy difference. When I would pop back into Mac OS X at home, I would say to myself, “Oh, man, I forgot how great Spaces / Expose / The Dock is.”

The Bottom Line

Google’s right, by the way. Chrome OS is the perfect experience for the enterprise work seat or on-the-go web users. Most people don’t care about their local file system, and big enterprises would probably prefer that employees don’t mess with local file systems. The laser-focused no-nonsense blend of a browser-only experience helps me not worry so much about crashing, app loading times, or any other traditional OS annoyances you could experience.

But don’t forget — you can enjoy all Chrome OS has to offer with just the Chrome browser. So I can’t help wonder what Google’s Chrome OS Netbook’s price tag is, and how fast people either adopt, or discard, the new paradigm of browser-only life. If it wasn’t for JoliCloud, I think I’d be feeling a little more edgy without local access.

Verdict? Think carefully about what factors into your work flow before you move to a Chrome OS device.

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