Android's Google Now services headed for Chrome, too | Hacker News Reader

Android's Google Now services headed for Chrome, too

news.cnet.com

67 pointsPr024 comments

Google Now is quite amazing. I wonder when we'll see Siri on the OS X.

The location aware stuff really is cool. I found that after a few days I stopped looking at it though since my daily routine wasn't really changing.

Then the other night I was walking by a local theater on the way to dinner, and thought I'd check the weather for an upcoming out-of-town trip. It knew I was near a theater and suggested upcoming showtimes, and then had no problem getting my weather request filled from a voice search.

So yeah, it's really cool, but I haven't yet found a way to remember to seek it out.

I've found it useful lately as it shows me all the tracking information on my packages that have tracking numbers in my email. With how many packages I had coming due to Christmas shopping, it was very convenient.

My family usually puts addresses on calendar events, and it's always fun to have my phone beep at me 15 minutes before I need to leave the house, based on current traffic. Then you tap on the notification and you get a map with the option to start navigation.

It's a promising direction, but the diff is really just a stub at this stage.

I used to think Siri would be the beginnings of ambient intelligence, but it seems like Google cares more about the idea.

Apple has to build a product around it, and that's tough. Google just builds it because it's cool.

You just noticed that Google is into AI and Apple isn't?

If by AI you mean artificial intelligence, then no - I agree it's pretty obvious Google is more into AI than Apple.

But if by AI you mean ambient intelligence (what I said) then wat. Siri was widely available before Google took steps in this direction. This is the opposite of what you've said, though Google Now has since surpassed Siri in performance. Moving it into the browser increases reach and more fully realises the vision of ambient intelligence.

Should I stop assuming people know what is meant by 'ambient intelligence?'

The shuttering of IG suddenly makes sense.

How so? Now doesn't seem to make any sense to me one the desktop (location aware notifications?) while I use IG many many many times per day to watch news feeds, common sites I like to go to, etc. It just organizes the stuff I care about, but it's what I want rather then how Now tries to figure it out for me.

I've found Now useful on my phone, don't get me wrong, but I might consult it once a week or less.

Not justifying it at all -- I use IG as well and think it is absurdly dumb of them to shutter it. However, it now makes sense as to why they'd close it: they're trying to get people to use Google Now instead.

Just to be clear, you are talking about iGoogle[1], right?

[1]: https://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Yes.

IG is crufty. Most widgets had bit rotted. IG needs a next-generation implementation and marketing.

Chrome is getting bloated. It was so nice and lean when I first touched it years ago.

I'd imagine you'd have to consciously enable it, right?

I love it when people say things like this without providing specifics. Not sure what you guys are talking about. The UI is the same and it seems to work just as well or better for me.

For one thing, I don't want the Flash plugin, also sync. Chrome feels slower and slower, I'm sorry that this upsets you.

It doesn't upset me when people notice a fact of reality, if it actually is the case. If Chrome was slow, it would be slow and a valid thing to point out, and we could discuss it.

But when someone makes a claim without giving any examples at all, that's kind of annoying. That's what leads to popular conceptions based only on accusation and rumors. But A+ for passive aggression.

Flash and sync are features that have been in Chrome for a really long time. So they're not an example of Chrome "getting bloated." If Chrome is slower now than it was in the past, it isn't because of these, since previous versions of Chrome that you'd be using for the comparison also had these features.

You might just want to check your system for laggy spyware. It's always possible that Chrome could get worse over time and slower than before, but it's not something that's showing up in CPU or memory usage like it clearly was for Firefox when it started to get worse.

So I believe it might be slower for you, but if it is, it's probably not because of feature creep or "bloating." An anecdote isn't a trend.

Coming to a browser near you but not your phones from 1 year ago.

Now if they would just fix the black-box browser sync...

I thought sync was just xmpp messages. I really don't know what that means but I was told it is like the browser is talking to the server soon after there is a configuration change just like the way I chat with someone on google talk. Am I barking up the wrong tree?

According to the documentation, it is, but I haven't tried snooping on the client myself. So I'm not sure if the data is obfuscated in any way.

"This means when a change occurs on one Google Chrome client, a part of the infrastructure effectively sends a tiny XMPP message, like a chat message, to other actively connected clients telling them to sync."

Source: http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sync

I was referring to there being no way to access or manipulate the "master" set of sync data on their servers - other than to delete it. There used to be a bookmarks folder that contained it in the user's docs account, but it is no longer available.

It's problematic if you have multiple clients and had previously used something like Xmarks. My meticulously curated folders and bookmarks get messed up across devices pretty fast, even after deleting sync data and starting fresh from a clean backup of bookmarks.

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