Classic Pandora Handling Google Drive?


TylerAW

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Aug 30, 2010
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I was wondering if anyone with a Class model has used Google Drive and Documents? If so, does it run well?

I guess I also want to know how well typing on it is for when you are not home, say in a word processor?

I'm sure at this point every single gaming question has been asked and is in the wiki, but I was just curious on how well this device works for writers out there?
 
I was wondering if anyone with a Class model has used Google Drive and Documents? If so, does it run well?

I guess I also want to know how well typing on it is for when you are not home, say in a word processor?

I'm sure at this point every single gaming question has been asked and is in the wiki, but I was just curious on how well this device works for writers out there?
I have been pleasantly surprised by my CC unit for plain browsing (reading articles is comfortably fast or downright snappy, loading the browser initially just takes a while) and using the only work related webapp I need to use (which works fully and is speedy enough).

From comments in these forums I feared the CC would be pretty much unusable for even basic browsing with firefox. Not the case at all.

So, when I read this post I figured I might as well try this for you and at the same time see myself how a really heavy webapp works :).

I tried with Firefox, logged in, created a new doc... Warning: Unresponsive script.

Tapped Continue and after some seconds I was able to type text with some lag.

Then tried to copypaste from wikipedia... Warning: Unresponsive script.

Tapped Continue and after some seconds text appears on screen and I was able to move in the text with arrowkeys, bold text etc.

Whether you consider this a bad experience or good depends on where you come from. If heavy text editing (there's different fonts, bullets, hypertext links, all kinds of stuff on screen now...) had been as fluid as this on my Amiga 500 I would have been a very happy man back in the 80s...

...but your expectations might be higher now.

The bigger problem is that I needed to both set Firefox to full screen and zoom out before I was able to see the longer menus completely. And by the time I had done that the text was way too small for me to work with it comfortably. I guess that is both a matter of taste and workflow, if you are ready to use zoom only when needed.

So in summary, after 15-30 minutes of messing with this:

Yes it works. All warnings were just that, only warnings, not errors. Firefox was simply not "patient" enough.

Once you start editing, it seems pretty OK, actually, especially if you do not mind a bit of lag while typing. Definitely a BBSy feel to it, though.

Making minimal edits (a letter, a comma...) to text already on screen seems to me to be fluid enough, especially considering the fact that the crap I copied from wikipedia has a lot of stuff going on. Even hyperlink popups come on screen at a very comfortable speed. It's the loading that's noticeably slow, editing is just laggy.

Adding text, like about a rowfull of stuff in the middle of the text lags but by the time you end up looking at the keyboard of the Pandora the text has mostly appeared on screen, a second or so for the rest of the text to appear and the end of the paragraph to reflow. At least in the text I copied and added. This probably varies by content.

This is clearly a desktop application... if there's a lighter, mobile version you can activate somehow that might be more suitable for the Pandora.

Adding a second drive document tab stalls. The CC simply does not have enough memory at that point. You enter a desert of unresponsive script messages and I even got to see a web page produced "the server is not responding quickly enough, try again by clicking "this link". That message was a big yellow bar (layer) at the top of the webpage itself for a while.

It is clear we're running on swap or whatever then. (I have not enabled swap or anything like that myself... but no crashes either... I assume Firefox itself manages the memory here?).

So it is one document at a time. Refreshing a drive tab after editing a doc is slow anyways.

Then again, even with this slowness, no, it didn't malfunction critically, it still worked as expected...

Google drive: Well, it is your bog standard Firefox I'm running, so of course it works. You need to zoom out. Clicking on reload takes some seconds. One tab only or you stall. Downloaded my test document as .docx... it came home very fast. Binned the test doc, deleted it from bin. Drive features all seem to work as far as I can see? With only one tab it isn't even annoyingly slow.

I have to say I would not use this... thing... not on a Pandora or a desktop. But then again I'm just grumpy old me and happy with Vim for my own texts and my own SSH server online for my own docs... There's simply no room or need for something like GoogleDocs in my life, all it does is use clockcycles I've paid good money for for gimmicky crap. But that's severy offtopic and a matter of taste :).

I read your other post too and was going to answer: The Pandora can definitely do word processing, but you might want to opt for text editing more on the Pandora instead.

If it is your plan to bounce material back and forth between a desktop and the Pandora, then I don't know how well it'll work.

That would imply you are going to use Libre Office and if that is the case, then that one is quite a memoryhog? Haven't tried it at all, though... I'll let someone else chime in on that one.

Then there's the practical side of things: Do you use a lot of Home, End, Pageup, Pagedown and cursor keys? Or are you constantly using the trackpad or a mouse?

You might want to relearn using the keyboard, because keeping the stylus in your palm while typing is a bit awkward (is for me at least...).

The physical aspect of typing is pretty much what you could expect on a mid 2000 smartphone like a Nokia communicator, E70 or E61. Meaning as good as it ever got to be in phone/PDA combination devices. Except the applications are designed for also using the mouse and thus you need to tap the screen quite often. Unlike in said phones the keyboard is not at all "crammed". Even the Nokia 9000 keyboard was crammed compared to the Pandora. You don't need to be a kid or female and you don't need to sharpen your fingernails to heavy metal band sharpness to use this keyboard accurately :).

I can tell you this much: I am still faster writing graffiti on a Palm device, than I am typing on the Pandora. Proper text recognizion has never worked for me, it's too slow to be of use. But Palms graffiti is still a winner, when you get used to it. It also makes the switching between stulys and keyboard redundant. It just works really well and I never really noticed before this...

I admit the primary reason I'm still faster with graffiti is simply my lack of practice on the Pandora.

Though the Pandora is qwerty, it has it's own keyboard layout you need to get used to.

It also has it's own feel to it. I sometimes have to hit a key twice to register, I try to "press lightly" and there is not "feel" for when to stop the action... you should hit the bottom every time and that is exactly the opposite of what I've been trying to teach myself to do...

Pressing Tab is especially something I never seem to just "automatically" get right...

Compared to other devices it is slightly... well... I'm hesitant to say "worse" than for example an old Nokia communicator, but definitely "different". As you might expect it doesn't hold a candle to a Psion 5 or somesuch. But then again, you'd label the Psion 5 as "netbook form factor" these days ;-).

Naturally this last part also applies to the 1 GHz version.

And at the end of the day it boils to this: What choice have you got?!

Try and find a good, PDA-sized typing machine on eBay and you soon realize your're simply not being catered for :-(.

All the other devices you might be able to find are bound to be worse than the Pandora in pretty much every way.

You might just as well get a Pandora, because it's the best there is!
 
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I have typed along half to full pages in meetings using LibreOffice Writer. If you have a table to sit the Pandora on and type with 6-8 fingers it is quite managable. That of course needs some getting used to and practice. Once you've had that it's quite alright for the size. For extended periods of hardcore typing I personally suggest something like the ThinkOutside Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard - you'll run into driver issues in combination with modern phones though, last time I checked those were out of production. Shame, really. Best mobile keyboard out there.
 
For extended periods of hardcore typing I personally suggest something like the ThinkOutside Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard - you'll run into driver issues in combination with modern phones though, last time I checked those were out of production. Shame, really. Best mobile keyboard out there.
Hey! Yeah, I definitely +1 this suggestion!

I had totally forgotten about these. I wonder if you could even attach the Pandora to the holder...

A company I worked for had one of these years ago for usage in QA testing some phone apps and I really fell in love with it. But I never got one, because they were and (checking... goodness, nearly "price new back then"="price used now"?!?) are still pretty expensive.

(Actually at the time I was using so old gear I did not personally own anything compatible... but that's the norm for me ;-)

If you manage to get one, they do make typing feel almost better (or even better? never done side by side comparisons...) than using a Psion 5. That, to me, is a benchmark achievement :).

kuru: Have you tested this with the Pandora? If I come across one for cheap enough I might be interested in getting one myself :).
 
Hmm, I do type on a regular keyboard for a desktop all the time. I type 2-8k word stories/ chapters per google document. Would it handle those? I don't need it to multi tab stories, just one at a time is ok.

Also if I end up just using these word processors on Pandora, can I go back and worth from Word 2010 and that or no?

Also, what is Vim lol?
 
kuru: Have you tested this with the Pandora? If I come across one for cheap enough I might be interested in getting one myself :).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHoM1WL32Qs

Oh well, one downside: Can't get a few  characters to work after using the stowaway, default pandora keymap is a bit buggy now: colon, double quotes, question mark... that's weird.

Tyler: Word 2010 is docx format? I have used those, as long as there's no fancy formatting it should be alright. LibreOffice will give you a warning, but I have always ignored that. Maybe somebody can try this, I have no example files at hand.
 
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Oh I had one other question, does Chrome not work on Open Pandora? I could have sworn there was an app for it a long time ago?
 
Oh I had one other question, does Chrome not work on Open Pandora? I could have sworn there was an app for it a long time ago?
The Chrome we have is crap. It's a Chrome-OS like Chrome and it does not work too well, and only in full screen...

We should get a new port, but porting Chrome is tedious...
 
Oh I had one other question, does Chrome not work on Open Pandora? I could have sworn there was an app for it a long time ago?
The Chrome we have is crap. It's a Chrome-OS like Chrome and it does not work too well, and only in full screen...

We should get a new port, but porting Chrome is tedious...

I'm guessing it works even worse if you are running Android on Pandora?
 
Just a comment - For those who travel and use their Pandora with libre office, I use the built in keyboard sometimes but when I get to an office I normally ask to borrow a full sized USB keyboard and hook it to my hub.  Works like a charm and is very responsive.  
 
Just a comment - For those who travel and use their Pandora with libre office, I use the built in keyboard sometimes but when I get to an office I normally ask to borrow a full sized USB keyboard and hook it to my hub.  Works like a charm and is very responsive.  
Doesn't that kind of defeat the point of having the Open Pandora have its own built in keyboard? It just seems kind of... I dunno depressing maybe... maybe I'm being cynical. 
 
I tried out my Stowaway with my Pandora for the keyboard review thing I did on Ekianjo's site.  It worked, but if I left it alone for a moment it always seemed to disconnect, which was a pain.  I don't recall having missing characters when I switched the Pandora's keymap to US.

@TylerAW Plenty of people hook up full sized laptops to USB keyboards when they get to the office.  Built-in keyboards are essential for outdoorsy hacking, but they can never match a decent full-sized keyboard.
 
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I tried out my Stowaway with my Pandora for the keyboard review thing I did on Ekianjo's site.  It worked, but if I left it alone for a moment it always seemed to disconnect, which was a pain.  I don't recall having missing characters when I switched the Pandora's keymap to US.

@TylerAW Plenty of people hook up full sized laptops to USB keyboards when they get to the office.  Built-in keyboards are essential for outdoorsy hacking, but they can never match a decent full-sized keyboard.
Of course they can never match up.. I guess I'm just trying to figure out if typing on the Open Pandora keyboard is going to significantly slow me down or not when I'm writing on the go. I'm basically 100% used to only writing my stories at home and I would like to change that.
 
As for Google Drive, as long as you don't mind not using it in the browser, you can always use it through a client and edit your files there with Libreoffice or some other text editor and sync with the google drive when you are done. That should be no problem even on a CC unit. 
 
As for Google Drive, as long as you don't mind not using it in the browser, you can always use it through a client and edit your files there with Libreoffice or some other text editor and sync with the google drive when you are done. That should be no problem even on a CC unit. 
Wait, how do you do that? Not to sound like a noob, but the only way I know of typing in drive is either the Browser version or the app version?

Or did you mean just typing in Libreoffice and then copying over the text to drive later?
 
Wait, how do you do that?
First, I think that Libreoffice has a function to sync with google docs directly integrated in it (but I never used it, honestly).

Otherwise, there are several google drive clients available on github (command line only, but that should not be very hard to make a GUI out of them). This is made possible because there are APIs you can communicate to. 

So there are multiple solutions to your problem :)
 
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Wait, how do you do that?
First, I think that Libreoffice has a function to sync with google docs directly integrated in it (but I never used it, honestly).

Otherwise, there are several google drive clients available on github (command line only, but that should not be very hard to make a GUI out of them). This is made possible because there are APIs you can communicate to. 

So there are multiple solutions to your problem :)
I looked it up and there is an option to synch with google documents on Libreoffice, of course I don't know if the Pandora version does this or not?

Also, I don't know what githhub is.
 
Libreoffice : See http://code.google.com/p/ooo2gd/

Should work but I have not tried this plugin yet. 

Github : http://www.github.com is a source code repository and management where people post their work and collaborate on the same piece of code. There are multiple projects here related to syncing folders with google drive. Most of them should be working on Pandora. Havent tried yet, though, because I don't really use Google drive. I prefer Bittorrent sync. 
 
So MrConfusion could not find the google drive option in Libre (I don't know if this means that it is there or not, he probably had no time to check). But anyway, I was wondering if a dropbox like application exists on Pandora? One that can send files back and forth from a Windows PC?
 
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