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Best note-taking setup with tablet and keyboard?
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 31, 2014 at 03:01 PM
Dang! That sounds really exciting! I’ve used CRD to interact with remote colleagues (with PC issues), but I didn’t realise it handled multiple monitors so well - I use three myself, so that sounds seriously interesting.
The PDF thing is, on the other hand, a bit of a downer. Sounds like a little exploration is required; I’m sure there’ll be some online solution somewhere. We use Kerio Workspace in-house, which has neat document previews (also of PDFs), but you have to docs to your local machine to do anything serious with them.
If you’re prepared to run your own server, you might want to check out something like Atlassian Confluence (available for just USD 10.00); it has pretty sophisticated document handling, but I’m not sure how well it treats PDF annotations.
But what a great excuse for a little CRIMPing research!
I’m delighted the machine is so satisfactory - I’ve been eyeing it with increasing interest after having to battle with an attempted Cryptolocker takeover here (fortunately our PCs are all protected by Foolish IT’s CryptoPrevent and Malwarebytes, but it was very scary for a while!). The temptation to just go all-Mac is considerable - until one looks at the budgets involved, and eyes up the really very nice Windows machines available for really very modest prices. And now… Chromebooks…
If you really need those PDFs on your system, you might want to look at the various options for installing dual-booting Linux on your Chromebook (booting from USB drive appears to be the way to go).
Cheers!
Bill
Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 31, 2014 at 03:56 PM
MadaboutDana wrote:
>If you really need those PDFs on your system, you might want to look at
>the various options for installing dual-booting Linux on your Chromebook
>(booting from USB drive appears to be the way to go).
Thanks for the suggestions. It’s not a big deal for me at the moment. For certain tasks the tablet form factor will always be better than a full laptop, such as reading ebooks and annotating PDFs. Yes, I’d probably install ChrUbuntu, if it becomes an issue.
But I suspect that Google will be forced to address this issue fairly soon. US school districts seem to be switching over from Windows to Chromebooks en mass, buying them by the thousands. (I suspect that’s why HP is having difficulty supplying demand in the UK. One has to wait for several weeks for a white one at that price.) And more and more teachers are starting to complain that the new system forced onto them doesn’t have PDF annotations and form-filling, which apparently is a popular way to mark homework etc. So we just need some more angry teachers :)
Posted by Franz Grieser
Feb 1, 2014 at 12:20 PM
Dottore.
>One very pleasant surprise was the Chrome Remote Desktop (CRD):
>https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desktop/gbchcmhmhahfdphkhkmpfmihenigjmpp
>This allows me to access my home PC with three monitors (extended desktops), which works really well in full-screen mode,...
Does that mean, you can e.g. control ConnectedText or any other Windows application running on your desktop PC from the Chromebook? That would be really cool.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 1, 2014 at 12:40 PM
Yup, that’s exactly what it means. I have a German colleague working several hundred miles away: CRD allows me to take control of her computer to sort out problems, install software, or simply demonstrate something.
For some reason, it’s not well known. But it works very well - and even better, it’s cross-platform!
Posted by Dr Andus
Feb 1, 2014 at 01:15 PM
Franz Grieser wrote:
>Does that mean, you can e.g. control ConnectedText or any other Windows
>application running on your desktop PC from the Chromebook? That would
>be really cool.
Yes. In a way this was already possible with apps like TeamViewer before, however you’d either need someone at the other end to type in IDs and passwords or the screen quality was so poor that you’d never actually want to do any proper work on the remote PC other than fix a few things.
What’s different with the Chromebook + PC combo via CRD is that as long as your remote PC is on and the internet connection is on (and you have installed Chrome and CRD on that PC beforehand and paired it with your Chromebook), it will only take typing one numerical password to establish the connection.
The other difference is the high quality of the transmission (at least on the HP Chromebook 14), and the ability to move from monitor to monitor on the remote PC. Depending on the quality of the internet connection, there might still be a bit of a lag when typing, but otherwise I was perfectly able to work in CT, and PhraseExpander may have even helped for me not to be bothered about the lag.
You may have trouble running software this way that rely on some special hotkey combinations (or on AutoHotkey), in cases where those keys might not be available on the Chromebook keyboard (although it seems to be possible to send over hotkey combinations too, I just haven’t figured out how to add mine to the ones that are already in CRD).