I wrote this morning about my disappointment streaming simple audio from a Chrome tab. I placed the blame, correctly, on Chrome and not the Chromecast but I may have been a bit harsh. I may have blamed son Chrome for the sins of father Google.
I've now had a Chromecast audio in my hands for about a half an hour. It is much less horrible than its video cousin. The SDK is still broken by design. The Cast Chrome extension is still very large and complicated. It still required my phone, and not my Macbook, to configure.
If you set aside the setup, the pointless cryptography is pointless but only modestly worse than Apple's scheme in Airplay.
Our beloved RMS used to say that it wasn't really important to have the source to the firmware of a device that behaved like a circuit. An OTP PIC micro controller pretending to be a quad NOR gate was as good freedom-wise as a real quad NOR gate. The audio Chromecast works almost as transparently and reliably as an old 900MHz wireless speaker and I'm prepared to treat it as a circuit for now.
I stand squarely behind the rest of this morning's rant. The browsers with native APIs are the only local, graphical, general-purpose platforms worth programming. I look forward to the day that my web app can stream to a Chromecast, or an Airplay, directly without obnoxious SDKs or extensions or App IDs or the cloud. Until then, I'll listen to some tunes.
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