Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
This past month, I attempted to use my Chromebook for two on-the-fly tasks: video editing and PDF file conversion. I work at a medical university, interacting with student doctors and medical professors. Often times, I am asked to do quick jobs to facilitate research or student learning. The Chromebook allows for implementation of these requests. However, this was the first time the Chrome OS failed in these two areas. In the early part of February, a medical professor and I recorded a demonstration video for a teaching lab. We used a Canon EOS Rebel camera on video mode. The video file was 15 minutes long. I did not want to hike across the campus back to my office at the end of the day to edit the file. I opened my trusty Toshiba Chromebook to find an app that would resolve this problem. There were two options for video editing.
The OpenShot online is an extension that requires a payment for use. I prefer using apps instead of extensions, so I tried WeVideo. The app worked well; however; I was severely limited in use. WeVideo allowed for only a 1 GB file, and 5 minutes for editing. Anything beyond those 2 conditions requires a yearly subscription. I could try using ClipChamp to edit video locally on my Chromebook, but it is geared towards vloggers and Youtube Channels. I ended up using my Linux machine to edit the video.
The second failure involved PDFs. I had to convert Research Abstract Posters. The posters were in PDF format and needed to be placed into MS Publisher. There is a minimal number of PDF readers, editors, and mergers for the Chromebook. However, none of those apps or extensions met my need. I ended up doing a trial run of Adobe Reader Pro to finish this task. There is currently no open-source solution that adequately answers the proprietary software.
The frailty to Chrome OS is apparent when specific tasks are required. Currently, my Toshiba Chromebook 2 does not have access to the Google Play Store’s Android Apps. The Chrome OS Developer Channel indicates that the Toshiba Chromebook 2 is inline for gaining Android Apps. The Android Apps might have fixed these two problems.
Google realizes this mistake. They are slowly integrating older hardware-compliant Chromebooks into the Google Play Store. The Chrome OS is too popular to fail, and the merge of Android into Chrome OS is probably done under the Chrome banner.
The biggest problem currently for older Chromebooks are the limitations of the Chrome Web Store. And, for the next 3 columns, I will review the apps and extensions available for other popular web browsers: Firefox, Vivaldi, and Midori. I will lightly cover the capabilities of each browser.