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Posts Tagged ‘Macs’

Ahoy! Celebrity Cruise Lines welcomes an Apple Store on board

Filed under: Retail, Cult of Mac, Odds and ends, Apple

Having withdrawal from all things Mac while on a sea voyage? Here’s some future therapy. The Celebrity Cruise ship company has announced a new Internet Cafe on the new 2,850 passenger Celebrity Eclipse which sets sail in April. The iLounge, as Celebrity has named it, will include a mini Apple Store where passengers can buy MacBooks, iPods and other accessories.

Passengers will also be able to sign up for courses in iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and iWeb. Two other new ships are coming on line in 2011 and 2012, and both will have the iLounge aboard.

Celebrity operates ships that cruise to Alaska, The Caribbean, Europe, South America, Canada and New England.

This isn’t the first time Macs have gone to sea. Back in 2008 we reported on Macs being installed on Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines for passenger use. Macs are also showing up in hotels and other places where tourists gather.

It sounds like a cool idea. Note to potential passengers: check out those internet costs when aboard. They are just a bit high.

TUAWAhoy! Celebrity Cruise Lines welcomes an Apple Store on board originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Macworld Expo: Jim Rea talks about the early days of Mac development

Filed under: Macworld, Software, Cult of Mac

When Apple first introduced the Macintosh, there weren’t many authorized third-party developers around… even fewer unauthorized ones, when you think about it. One guy did manage to sneak in the back door and ship his app for the original Mac on an accelerated schedule: Jim Rea, the founder of ProVUE Development. The company’s original database for the Mac, OverVUE, was the 2nd commercial app to ship for the platform (Microsoft’s Multiplan was #1). The DB application later evolved into Panorama, which continues to run on the Macs of today.

Jim was kind enough to share some of his memories from the early years, and update us on the soon-to-ship Panorama version 6. Both videos are in the continuation of this post.

TUAWMacworld Expo: Jim Rea talks about the early days of Mac development originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Macworld 2010: Telltale Games and their Mac revolution

Filed under: Macworld, Gaming, Software, Interviews, Developer

Well, there you go. After consistent rumors that the whole catalog would be coming over to the Mac, Telltale Games announced at Macworld last week that that’s exactly what was going to happen. Starting with the Tales of Monkey Island series (based on the Lucasarts games, where many Telltale developers formerly hung their hats), the company will co-release Mac and PC versions, giving customers versions for both platforms at the same time. Telltale is hosting a vote on its website right now as to the next game set to be released, but as we learned directly from co-founders Dan Connors and Kevin Bruner, eventually the whole platform, including Monkey Island, Sam and Max, Wallace and Gromit, and Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, is coming over. And it’s probably not long until the iPhone and the iPad follow suit.

Kevin Bruner spoke with us on the livestream during the show, and Dan Connors sat down for a longer interview about Telltale’s past, the decision to join the Mac gaming community, and what both founders think of Apple’s newest platforms and the Mac community at large. Read on to see the full text of the interview.

TUAW: You guys here at the show are announcing your Mac revolution — you’re bringing everything over to the Mac. First question is: Why? Why are you jumping into the Mac in this way?

Dan Connors, CEO Telltale Games: We’ve always wanted to be on as many platforms as we could, and the Mac platform has continued to get more and more attractive to us, from how well it performs, and how slick it is and what it’s capable of doing. And I think our content is differentiated in a way that the audience of people that are on Macs and that use Macs as a platform are a good target audience to build our products for. The fact that they’re story-based and they’re problem solving, they’re a little different than what typical gaming is about.

I was going to say yes, people who play your games, and fans of your games, it’s very clear to spot. You can look at a game and know that Telltale probably worked on it because it’s kind of got that old retro 2D LucasArts aesthetic. How do you describe your company and the games your company makes to someone who may not know about them?

I think the things that are critical for Telltale is that we’re really interested in interactive storytelling, and we’re really interested in doing that around with existing story and characters that have a proven quality and characters that last and have audiences that are devoted because the storytelling and the character creation has been so strong. All of our characters across all of our franchises are very iconic within their audiences, and that’s what attracted us to them. It’s funny you call us “retro,” because we believe that we’re taking something that was a way of playing games that was very easy to play from a physical standpoint, and trying to figure out the right way to expose that to people that aren’t necessarily games, but want to enjoy franchises and be part of an interactive experience for them to try.

So it’s an interesting line to walk as we kind of continue to create gaming experiences that really resonate for a certain group of people that have an expectation for them, but at the same time try to evolve it in a way that anybody can just pick up and play it and get it. If they’re a fan of Wallace and Gromit, and they come into a Telltale world, they feel like they’re playing Wallace and Gromit. That’s really always our goal. And figuring out the right gameplay mechanics in which to make that happen, that’s really where the innovation lies in our company, especially at this stage.

Yeah, I call you retro, but in terms of a developer, you’re actually very new because you have multiple tracks going in terms of what you’re doing. You’re taking old licenses like Monkey Island, loved licenses, and moving forward with those, and you’ve got newer licenses and newer worlds that you’re kind of building, and you’ve dipped into episodic gaming. How do you balance all of the balls that you’re juggling in the air?

It’s ironic because everything has been planned out to some degree in steps. The first part of the business was doing these episodic monthly releases, which were kind of holy grail-ish for a while, and investing in the production ability to do that. How do you make it happen?

Then there was building the business around it to support it, and be a self publisher, and go out and do licensing. So the one thing that was rock solid was we had a demand for the games that we were building. So from that demand, that audience, they knew we weren’t going to come to retail with it, we knew we weren’t going to bring it to retail, so we said we’re going to do this completely new, this revolutionary thing with the way this game is distributed, and they said, “Whatever!”

As they usually do. What else would gamers say?

“Just get it to us, we’ll figure it out, we’ll work together,” and we’ve had a tight feedback loop with them for five years, handling a whole ton of processes that, for now, with us, we’re really robust, and we can focus on, ok, how do we take this and make it happen for a mainstream franchise, where it’s not all gamers, but it’s a huge audience. And we’ll always be doing the gamer stuff as well — there are multiple tracks, like you said, and there are different levels to our business. We’ve been able to grow with this audience that was really savvy, adventure gamers have always been smart. (Laughs) They can figure it out, they almost don’t want to have their hands held.

So when something like Monkey Island comes along, four years in, that’s in our wheelhouse. We’ve been built to do that. And then we looked at it and said, it has this soap opera element to it, and this is the missing piece that we’ve been missing from Sam and Max and Strongbad, let’s tie it all together, like a real season of it. And we were focused on nailing that in Monkey and I really think that was the biggest success of the whole season for us.

I did want to talk a little more technically about process. When the rumors were going around that you were headed to the Mac, one of the things that we heard was that it would be easy to port the games over. How did you find the development on the Mac? How did that work out for you?

It was harder than we expected. Probably because we didn’t expect it to be difficult. We wanted to move our whole core technology over. We weren’t going to just do a one-off of it — we wanted to enable the Mac as a platform for us for everything going forward. Monkey was the closest in the library to being released, so it made a lot of sense to do the transition with that, but it was still built for different groups under different rules of development, different platforms. But now that we’re over, everything should be pretty straightforward. Not a port — the platform supports it. It’s pretty similar to Playstation, in terms of the different things you need to solve. So just from the lifecycle of the company, it made sense at this point to address the GL issues and making it run on that type of rendering system.

If we were a huge company, it probably would have been easier for us, but it was still relatively painless.

So once you’ve made that transition, then I guess everything going forward that we see from you all, we can expect day and date on both platforms?

Yeah, that’s our intent. The only real hangup is the QA and what bugs are going to exist, going to be unique to the Mac. But that didn’t seem like the issue. Now that the renderer is solved, that doesn’t seem like it’s going to be an issue going forward.

Great. I want to talk also about the iPhone — it’s been a successful outlet for sure, and as you said, the casual basis of the point-and-click is perfect for the iPhone. What do you think of the App Store in terms of development as opposed to these other platforms?

We don’t have anything over yet (ED: The Secret of Monkey Island on iPhone was produced by Lucasarts, not Telltale.) From what we’ve heard, it’s a very democratic process, but there’s a lot of product that needs to be processed and needs to go through the queue. That’s the issue. And kudos to them because that’s a sign of success. But obviously we want to get over there and be on the iPhone because so many people are using it as an entertainment device. It’s just, what’s the right product experience, how do our games translate over there? The point and click stuff is pretty forward, Monkey Island Special Edition did really well.

Are you interested in releasing within a certain time frame on the iPhone, then? Seems like it would be easier with Mac development under your belt.

Exactly. It’s the next target from a new platform standpoint for sure. We’re a little surprised that it’s been the gaming device that it has, but we’re certainly interested in getting there. Understanding the marketing, and how to stand out amongst all of the other apps, I think, is something that we’re interested in watching other people do, because it’s a crowded marketspace and it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of different levers you can pull on the deck itself. But if it’s something where our platform supports it, and we can have a game and have an iPhone app along with a Mac product all at the same time, then it just makes sense to always be developing with that in mind.

And this is hypothetical at this point, considering that we haven’t touched one, but since we’re at Macworld 2010 and you’re a developer, I have to ask you about the iPad. One thing we’ve heard from developers here is that the iPad is a very different platform from the iPhone. They run the same apps, and you can upscale, but a lot of developers are looking at making completely different apps. You’re still thinking about the iPhone, but in terms of what you’ve seen about the iPad, what do you think about that platform?

I think the ten inch screen is closer to what we do now than going all the way down to a handheld device, especially since we’re really focused on being a cinematic company, and having character development and a cinematic presentation. So a larger screen is definitely of interest to us. I don’t know about the nuts and bolts of how different the iPad is from the iPhone or the Mac processor in general, but certainly from a way to interact with the product, a large touch device has a ton of possibility.

“He says, smiling…” (Laughs)

The question is, what’s the install base going to end up being? How many people are going to use it to have interactive experiences on? My feeling is, and the reason I’m in this business, is I believe everything’s going to be interactive at some point. Maybe not now, maybe not five years from now, but I think this generation’s coming up and they’re going to expect to be able to interact with every product there is. So it feels like a first step, well not a first step, at this point it’s probably a fourth or fifth step, but it’s another step on the road, and it kind of feels like it’s bridging notebooks and handheld devices.

I guess the thing that’s still kind of unclear to me is: who’s the iPad targeted at? Is it an entertainment device, or is it a note-taking device, or is it a personal data assistant? Because I’ve got all of those things in different devices — is it going to try to be an all in one?

I don’t know. I can’t answer because I don’t know yet.

Are you going to get one?

Well, not on day one. I’ll probably wait for another revision. Because you’re right, I’ve got a laptop, I’ve got an iPhone, I don’t see room for me in there. I think there is room, and I think it’ll be popular, but not for me personally. But welcome to the Mac! You’re a newcomer here, what do you think of the community that you’ve seen here?

Oh it’s great. One of the reasons that brought us over to it is the creative focus of it. We’re a little different in the things that we’re focused on, storytelling and presentation, and those things really resonate here. And innovation as well — the thing that fascinates me about the iPhone thing is the way that you can I can stand here together and say gee, there should be an app for that, and then someone goes and makes one. It’s so fluid like that. It’s fascinating, and it’s a good crowd to be around. I’ve been to a lot of different shows, and this has its own unique character, so we’re happy to be here.

And frankly, 2/3 of the staff are all Mac heads, so they’re all excited to be here. Kevin Bruner is a big Mac guy. So they’ve been around the community and been part of the community. There’s always one wing of development that’s like, “I’m doing it on my Mac.” And we’re like c’mon, and he’s like, “No, I’m doing it on my Mac!”

Great. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

TUAWMacworld 2010: Telltale Games and their Mac revolution originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rumor: Apple Has Another Tablet In The Works. More Like A Mac Than An iPhone.

In the movie Contact, when revealing to main character Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) that there is actually a second space travel machine that was being built at the same time as the first one, but in secret, S.R. Hadden (John Hurt) says, “why build one when you can have two at twice the price?” Apple, it seems, may have the same line of thinking.

By now, we’ve all seen the iPad and know just about everything about it that we possibly can. But did you know that the secretive company may actually be hard at work on a second device already? Now, before I say anything else, take this information with a grain of salt. While it originated from a good source, it was a second-hand source. Meanwhile, I’ve corroborated the main details with another source, but not some of the smaller ones. That said, from what I’m hearing, Apple is pretty far along on work on second tablet device. A bigger one. And this one may be much more like a Mac than an iPhone.

Before the iPad was revealed last week, rumors circulated for a long time that Apple might be working on two different sizes for the screen of the device. Some had the device as small as 7″, others were saying it would go up to 10.6″. (The actual size of the iPad is 9.7″.) But the information we’re hearing is that Apple is thinking much larger for another version of the product, maybe all the way up to the 15.4″ size that it currently uses for one version of the MacBook Pro. If you think that would be way too big for an iPad, we’re also hearing that this other tablet would be quite a bit different from the one revealed last week. Namely, it could run a version of OS X much closer to the traditional version that runs on Macs.

If there is any truth to that, we could learn something as soon as Apple’s WWDC event this year, which will likely take place in June (just as it does every year). Apple typically uses the event to show off its new iPhone hardware, but it is first and foremost an event for Mac platform developers, and the past two years have seen OS X as a major component. This included two years ago when Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) made a surprise appearance and developers got a very early peek. There is already talk that WWDC 2010 could bring a similar peek at OS X 10.7. If there are some significant multi-touch components to OS X 10.7, you can expect the rumors to start flying about this new device that I’m talking about (or possibly touchscreen iMacs).

As usual, you should also note that Apple likely has a ton of projects in various stages that never see the light of day. It seems certain that at points they were playing with different sized screens for what became the iPad. But one of our sources here puts this new tablet as being released within the next year.

While everyone is still debating the uses of the iPad, a larger tablet would probably have a completely different set of uses. For example, it would likely be meant to be more of a straightforward laptop (or desktop) replacement. As such, it would almost undoubtedly come with some sort of external keyboard/stand just as the iPad offers as an accessory, but it would probably be a more integral part of using the device. When undocked, maybe you could use the thing just as you would an iPad (which is to say, holding it or placing it in your lap and using your fingers to manipulate its screen). And maybe while docked, you would even use a bluetooth mouse or touchpad device attached to the keyboard to interact with it.

Based on various patent filing and the general trend of multi-touch enabled devices (Magic Mouse, MacBook trackpads, etc) that Apple has been releasing, it seems that Apple is definitely trending in the direction of touch computing as the future of computing. A larger tablet device could serve as a nice transition device between the traditional laptop and this new type of computing. And just as the iPhone has prepared many of us to naturally use the iPad, the iPad may do the same for this new tablet.

And while a larger screen tablet would undoubtedly cost more than the iPad, Apple would have a lot of room to price it if it really was meant to be a laptop-replacement. If that’s the case, anything north of $1,000 wouldn’t seem unreasonable, unlike it would have for the iPad.

That said, for that type of price, people are going to expect a machine that is as powerful as a laptop. We’re also hearing that Apple would likely use an Intel chip (just as it uses in traditional Macs) in such a device rather than its new custom-made A4 chip. The problem with that would be power consumption. A larger screen plus a power-hungry chip would likely lead to a battery life well below the stated 10-hour limit for the iPad. Still, if they could bring something like that in with around around 5+ hours of battery, plenty of people would be happy. And Apple has made a lot of advancements in the past couple of years with getting battery life on its laptops well above industry averages.

In terms of weight, the iPad is 1.5 pounds, while the MacBook Air is 3 pounds (with a 13.3″ screen). If Apple could remove all the unnecessary parts of the MacBook Air (like the keyboard and trackpad), it could probably keep a device pretty close to the 2-3 pound weight even with a larger screen. But given such a large screen, it would almost undoubtedly have to come with some kind of case to put it in so as not to damage the screen when in transit.

In terms of what OS X applications could or would support multi-touch integration, that’s hard to say. Safari is an easy and obvious one, but others would have to be completely reworked for this. But as we saw during the iPad keynote, Apple didn’t need too long to do that with its iWork suite of apps. Third-party developers would likely get a good set of tools from Apple to update their apps as well. Again, take this all with a grain of sale, but look for clues in OS X 10.7.

[image: Steve Burg]

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Andy Rubin Has Some Steve Jobs In Him

Andy Rubin, pictured above surrounded by press after the Nexus One event today, is the guy who founded Android and sold it to Google in 2005. And he’s starting to remind me a little of another product fanatic, Steve Jobs.

Everyone knows about Jobs’ amazing ability to build hit products and disrupt entire industries. I wrote extensively about this in What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?. Jobs is all about the product. Every last detail. And it shows. He’s disrupted the mobile phone, music, film and television industries, and we haven’t even mentioned the Macs yet.

But Jobs is also notoriously touchy and difficult to work with. He demands perfection and doesn’t really work well with others. And Jobs is distrustful of the press. Apple’s PR group is mostly there to not return calls.

We forgive him all that, of course. Because he’s changing the world, and forces competitors to do better just to try to keep up. The world, particularly the tech world, is a far more colorful place because of Jobs. There is no one at Apple who has the product vision to push that company forward once he steps down. He’s the Alexander the Great of today’s tech world. And he’s also able to captivate a crowd when he’s on stage.

Rubin isn’t Steve Jobs. He doesn’t have the product track record that Jobs has (no one in the world does). And Rubin is shy on stage – he doesn’t make any real effort to win over the crowd. There was no “and one last thing” line at today’s Nexus One launch by Rubin. Only Steve Jobs can really pull that off.

But Rubin is a product fanatic in the same way that Jobs is. The NY Times did a good overview of Rubin in 2005. One line about Rubin, a former Apple engineer and cofounder of WebTV and Danger, stuck with me from that article: “Mr. Rubin is a proven member of an earlier group of engineers-turned-entrepreneurs who have a passion for building complete digital systems.”

I’ll say. A lot of credit for the Nexus One goes to his senior team, particularly Mario Queiroz and Erick Tseng (two people Google put on stage today). But the vision for the Nexus One was all Rubin, we keep hearing from people at Google. And he wouldn’t compromise, even after it was clear Google would miss their original deadline of shipping the Nexus One in time for the 2009 holiday rush. “Rubin kept saying it has to be thinner,” mumbled one tired team member to me after the event, “so we made it thinner.”

He has incredible power within the Android group at Google, and even VPs at Google there make sure not to cross him. People who work with him have told me of his amazing attention to detail and his unbending demands that a product be perfect before it goes out the door. A lot of that shows in the Nexus One, Google’s first complete end to end hardware and software system.

Rubin has many of the same personality traits as Jobs. He’s a product visionary and fanatic who likes the dictatorial style of product development. He’s not great with people, and doesn’t deal well with the press. At today’s Nexus One event you could see his barely contained frustration at the questions fired off at him during the Q&A session. “I’m just not going to say anything else about that” was one quip he fired off after a reporter kept asking the same question over and over. Jobs, of course, doesn’t do Q&As.

And that’s just fine with me. I don’t care if the people we cover are likable, or like me. Being affable or loquacious isn’t a job requirement for Awesome Product Guy. You just have to have a strong vision, be unwilling to bend, and have the means of following through with that product to launch.

Like Jobs, Rubin has known failure. He’s even been fired from his own company, Danger. But like Jobs, he went on to bigger and better things. For Jobs it was NeXT and Pixar, then back at Apple. For Rubin, it was Android.

Is the Nexus One as disruptive as the iPhone? No. Apple started this party and the Nexus One is part of that same revolution. But it’s disruptive in different ways, and its openness (and paring with Google Voice) is pretty exciting. And I get the feeling that his team is just getting started with this whole Android thing.

Ten years from now we’ll look back. Rubin may just be another exec at another big company. Or he may be something more. Heck, he may even be running Apple. His personality would fit right in.

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Fifteen lucky TUAW readers will start 2010 with a free copy of Pastebot

Filed under: Software, iPhone, iPod touch

It’s no secret that TUAW bloggers love Pastebot, the new and tasty iPhone / iPod app from Tapbots. Dave Caolo even referred to Pastebot as “his mistress,” and I find that I’m using it constantly to move text and images between my Macs and iPhone.

Well, Tapbots wants you to join in on the goodness, so we’re going to have a quick giveaway here at TUAW. We have 15 Pastebot promo codes to hand out, and you can enter the giveaway! Here’s the scoop:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
• To enter leave a comment telling us how Pastebot will help you keep a New Year’s resolution.
• The comment must be left before Saturday, January 2, 2009, 11:59PM Eastern Standard Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Fifteen winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prizes: Promo Code for one copy of Pastebot (Value: US$2.99)
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

If you didn’t read my review of Pastebot last month, be sure to read up on the features of this unique and useful utility.

TUAWFifteen lucky TUAW readers will start 2010 with a free copy of Pastebot originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 01 Jan 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft enables Silverlight video streaming to iPhones

At PDC 2009, Microsoft demonstrated Silverlight video streaming to an iPhone. While Microsoft user experience platform manager Brian Goldfarb said that Microsoft “worked with Apple” to make it happen, don’t expect plug-ins for Mobile Safari to start flooding the App Store. Instead, Microsoft worked to make its IIS7 server software capable of sending an QuickTime-compatible stream to an iPhone embedded with a HTML5 <video> tag.

Though Silverlight is more than just a video format—it’s more of .NET authoring runtime for web-based applications, much like Flash as become—its media delivery features are what content providers wanted on the iPhone. “The promise of Silverlight is that it’s a cross-device, cross-browser, cross-platform solution, and it works the same on Macs as it does on Windows,” Goldfarb told BetaNews. “The iPhone is a unique scenario. We talked to our customers…and they said, ‘Look, we just need to get our content there, and it’s mainly in the media space like broadcasting, and we want to put it on the iPhone.’”

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Want To Try Out Google Chrome OS For Yourself? Here’s How.

The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux.

First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.

First, you need to get an image of Chrome OS. You can do that using this torrent. You can also try out the build that GDGT has uploaded, which worked fine in our test as well. If you get the torrent version, you’ll see it’s in a .BZ2 format. You’ll need to extract it. Macs should be able to do this automatically, but for Windows you may need a tool like Win Rar.

Once that’s done, download a version of VirtualBox for whatever OS you’re running on here and install it. After registering (or declining to) you’ll be met with a screen like this. Click the button that says “New” in the upper left hand corner. We’re going to be making a new virtual machine.:

You’ll enter a wizard like this. Hit next.

Go ahead and title the OS whatever you’d like. For the operating system, choose Linux, with Ubuntu as the version (other setups could potentially work, but this is the only one we’ve gotten working).

Choose how much memory to allocate to this virtual machine. This will be dependent on how much memory you have in your computer. The more, the better, but if you choose too much your real computer will become unstable/very slow.

Here’s the tricky part (fortunately it isn’t very tricky). You don’t want to create a new hard disk, instead, you want to use an existing hard disk. Don’t choose one from the drop down menu either — you’re going to want to hit the folder icon just to the right of that to enter the ‘virtual media manager’.

Hit the ‘Add’ button.

Now you have to find the Chrome OS image you downloaded earlier. This is probably on your desktop or in your downloads folder. Once you’ve found it, hit ‘Open’.

Hit ‘Select’ once you reach this window.

Almost there. Make sure ‘use existing hard disk’ is checked. Hit next.

Hit ‘Finish’

You’re done! Hit Start. Hopefully the screen will go black, but only for a little while (this could be anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute or so, depending on how fast your computer is).

Once you’re in, you’ll see a splash screen for ‘Chromium’ (which is what Google calls dev builds of Chrome). To login, you’ll need to enter a valid Google Account ID. Your standard Gmail account should work, but as we said before, this build of ChromeOS came from bittorrent, so you may want to use a throw away account like we did in the screenshots below (you can make one here).

You’re in. Now time to explore. To be honest, everything looks quite similar to Google’s Chrome browser, but there are a few key differences. Note the battery life indicator and options menu in the far upper right. Also try playing around with the ‘New Window’ functions — you’ll find that it’s difficult (if not impossible) to navigate between multiple windows. And be wary of the Bookmarks manager. As far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to get out of it — you’ll have to manually create a new bookmark, which will kick you back into the browser mode once you click it. Oh, and good luck finding the ’shut down’ button, because we sure can’t.

You probably won’t need it, but the shared user password for this install (which you’d need for functions like sudo) is ‘chromeos’ according to the torrent’s listing on ThePirateBay.

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