Bumping against Chrome’s limits

ChromeOS isn’t like Windows or OSX.

It functions well for basic everyday computing. As you’d expect, anything you can do in a browser works.

You can deal with email, research information and write documents using Google Docs without skipping a beat. It’s fine if you crunch numbers in a (modest) spreadsheet, produce a presentation or peer through a web portal into a database.

While it is, in effect, little more than a browser, that’s more than enough for applications like Xero or Evernote which were built that way from the outset.

ChromeOS barriers

Yet if your computer use is more sophisticated, sooner or later, you will bump against barriers that don’t exist if you run Windows or OSX.

Take dealing with photos. ChromeOS has rudimentary built-in photo editing. You can adjust an image’s brightness and contrast. You can crop.

There’s an auto-adjust button, although for some unexplained reason that was greyed-out when I came to test the software. Changing the image or canvas size do not appears to be options.

Standalone apps

This kind of work is best dealt with by a standalone app. It doesn’t have to be Photoshop, there are alternatives.

There are plausible-looking photo editing apps in the ChromeOS app store. Many are free, but none are even remotely professional class.

Take Google’s Picasa, it’s not great and difficult to use. Then there is Pixlr Editor.

Pixlr is like a two-dollar shop Photoshop knock-off. It’s not pretty, but it does all the basic photo-editing tasks. It’s free, lightweight and uncluttered. But it’s simply not up to the quality of the standalone Windows or OSX apps.

Web building

If you want to work on a website with a Windows PC or a Mac, a good approach is to install hosting software on your computer, edit code locally before loading the finished product to a remote host.

You can’t do that on ChromeOS. Admittedly it was never designed for this work. That said, you might reasonably expect a cloud-centric operating system to be an ideal tool for designing and managing websites.

It isn’t.

One option would be to buy some online hosting space and work on the site using FTP. Although that’s not practical because there’s no obvious FTP client in the Chrome Web Store, there are tools for working with PHP and CSS files on Dropbox or Google Drive, but that’s a weird roundabout way to build web sites.

Skype missing in action

We use Apple’s Facetime and old-fashioned mobile telephone voice or text for most communications.

My family all have Apple kit, so we can videoconference when we’re apart.

In my journalism work I spend a lot of time interviewing or chatting with contacts on the phone or using video.

Skype isn’t great, but it is a decent fall-back option. Sometimes a Skype voice-only call works over connections that can’t handle Facetime. And some people I work with – particular overseas – like to make Skype calls.

Chrome OS doesn’t support Skype.

Hangouts... really?

Google suggests Chromebook users make do with Google Hangouts. I’ve never found this service to be worth the effort, although I know of people who love it.

My problem here is that I have incoming requests for calls from people and Hangouts is not of the list of options.

ChromeOS has the advantage of simplicity. It is well-suited for straightforward tasks that rely heavily on the web.

However, its limitations become evident when tackling more complex work like advanced photo editing, web development or integrating specific tools such as Skype.

If you can live with the compromises, then maybe it will work for you, otherwise, you’d be better off avoiding ChromeOS and choosing Windows, OSX or Linux.