Chromebooks

[Paolo Casaschi]

Hi Paolo,

Thanks for your posts. I did manage to install your extension yesterday and take a quick look - looks potentially very useful and would have done exactly what I need, a shame you can't keep up development - I'm not familiar with the Chrome extension security changes but I understand how frustrating it is as a programmer when new versions or standards appear out of nowhere and break something you've spent a lot of time on.

I was thinking along the lines of not a Chrome extension but instead a hosted web app to access the users Google Drive files and then using the standard pgn4web viewer to display the games, should be possible I think? (but yes, I do tend to throw flippant comments such as "shouldn't be too hard" around too often without doing thorough research!). Will investigate in more detail when I have some time next week.

Cool. Let me know if you need any help on the pgn4web side.
I dont know much about integrating google drive within a web app, whatever you mean with "web app", these days everything seems to be referred to as a web app, or even better a cloud based solution; in fact some of the pages in the main pgn4web distribution (the download file pgn4web-x.xx.zip) could be seen as some sort of "web app", look for instance at viewer.php, it might give you some ideas.
Just one fundamental clarification about pgn4web: pgn4web has been designed as a "viewer" of PGN files and from a viewer perspective you can do a lot of stuff: browse games, search games, analyze games with an engine and so on. However, as a viewer, pgn4web does not provide any facility for editing the PGN files, so you can not easily do any of these: create a new PGN file, add games to a PGN file, add variations and/or comments to a PGN game and so on. If any of those is a requirement, most likely pgn4web is not the right PGN library for you.

[Paolo Casaschi]

Hi Paolo,

Thanks for your posts. I did manage to install your extension yesterday and take a quick look - looks potentially very useful and would have done exactly what I need, a shame you can't keep up development - I'm not familiar with the Chrome extension security changes but I understand how frustrating it is as a programmer when new versions or standards appear out of nowhere and break something you've spent a lot of time on.

I was thinking along the lines of not a Chrome extension but instead a hosted web app to access the users Google Drive files and then using the standard pgn4web viewer to display the games, should be possible I think? (but yes, I do tend to throw flippant comments such as "shouldn't be too hard" around too often without doing thorough research!). Will investigate in more detail when I have some time next week.

Hello Simon,

did anything come up from your investigation, either from you or other interesting web app?

I just found a FICS client implemented as a web app: http://www.mobialia.com/apps/chess/

[Christopher Kreuzer]

This old thread is useful, as I also have a Chromebook now. Would anyone be able to add new advice to this thread or is the stuff from 2013 still pretty much the same advice as would be given now?

[Adam Raoof]

I would buy a Chromebook, but I do need to install Swiss Master!

Is there a small lightweight laptop that runs Chrome OS and a windows emulator?

[Paolo Casaschi]

I would buy a Chromebook, but I do need to install Swiss Master!

Is there a small lightweight laptop that runs Chrome OS and a windows emulator?

I'd rather get a cheap windows laptop and use google chrome on that one. Not much different than ChromeOS.

There's no obvious way to run windows on a chromebook device.
What could be done is to run linux in parallel to ChromeOS, then run your windows applications on linux using an emulator. But it requires some manipulation of your chromebook that ultimately takes away the biggest advantage of chromebooks (zero administration effort). If you are interested google for "crouton chromebook".

About chess app for chromebooks, there's not much available. You can still use most of the chess websites (provided they do not rely on java) and cloud based services, however there are very few dedicated chrome app for chess:
- a FICS client http://www.mobialia.com/apps/chess/
- a PGN viewer https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... kbjadoafli
The latter does what Simon was looking for in a post above: it takes PGN files from your google drive and shows a chessboard; it's based on pgn4web but unfortunately the author took a questionable decision while picking the games viewer, the pgn4web package has much more suitable options in my opinion.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

I am trying to get PGNs to open in a Chromebook. The above was written a couple of years ago. Before I try this, will it still work and is there anything more recent that might be better?

[Laurie Roberts]

Do you need an app?

there are sites like chess microbase (http://www.chessmicrobase.com) if you just want to store your own games. This site has an inbuilt chess engine (2700 elo ish) for basic analysis also

If you want to search a database of master games, you can access chessbase on line via the Web for free (complete with let's check info). you can also setup a position and use a Web based version of fritz to analyse the position http://database.chessbase.com/js/apps/database/