Dec 11: Views, Menus, Picasa Web Integration

Chromium OS has switched to the Views toolkit, which I understand to be a wxWidgets-like library specific to Chromium. The underlying code still uses Gtk (or whatever the specific platform uses), but the Chromium OS-specific code does not interface directly with Gtk. This makes the code much more portable for other platforms. From what I can tell, Windows uses Views as its main widget library, but Chromium OS has the flag TOOLKIT_VIEWS defined, while Windows does not. Also, relatively recently, the style of bookmark menus has changed. I don't know when the change happened, but they don't seem to be using traditional Gtk drawing.

The "&" before "Bookmark manager" is Windows' system of making the next character underlined and a shortcut if the menu is open. (The Gtk equivalent is the _ character.) This seems like it's directly using Views instead of Gtk. The other numerous menus, such as the status area, page, wrench, and tab menus still use Gtk.

Also, the "Create application shortcuts..." dialog has changed to be like the about and external protocol dialogs; it's directly using Views.

I'm guessing that the code is shared with the Windows code, because I doubt that they'd rewrite it and include 'Desktop' since Chromium OS does not have a traditional desktop. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the 'Applications menu' stays and actually adds it to the main menu currently hosted on Google's servers. Personally, I quite like the appearance, if the X button were to be positioned a bit lower.

Also, the Chromium OS file browser added an option and an icon for uploading pictures to Google's Picasa Web Albums. (I couldn't find it in the interface.) Chromium OS' platform is the web, so tight integration with it is essential. If more additions like this one to the file browser come, we could essentially have the famous "Google Drive."

17 October (r29376): Date and Time

This is the first of probably and hopefully many posts detailing Chromium OS changes, which I'll be summing incrementally. Instead of talking here about all the differences between Chromium OS and normal Chromium, I'll just point you to these two: http://sites.google.com/sites/randomlinuxnerd and http://livinginagoogleworld.blogspot.com/2009/10/chrome-os-browser-tour-possible-look-at.html This is a couple days newer than those two links.

This change brought two minor changes: 1) The menu shown by clicking the clock now has an option to "Open date and time options...", and 2) a Timezone selector in the options menu. Clicking the Timezone selector offers shows the many timezone options.

Some other changes: I don't know if it was this way before, but popup windows seem to open in new tabs instead of separate GtkWindows.

Download revision 29376: Extract the chromium-os-rxxxxx.tgz archive and run chromium-os. To get the many translations, extract chromium-os-i18n-rxxxxx.tgz and move the files to the locales/ folder. To get the HTML element inspector, extract chromium-os-inspector-rxxxxx.tgz and move the inspector/ folder to the resources/ folder (create it if necessary).

chromium-os-r29376.tgz (16.22mb)

chromium-os-i18n-r29376.tgz (1.37mb)

chromium-os-inspector-r29376.tgz (538kb)

r27396.diff (21.9kb)