While frameworks such as Rails and Django have made it easy to build web apps and services like AppEngine and Heroku have streamlined the process of deploying your web apps, actually charging for it is still a big pain.

Monetizing web apps is still a painful process, especially for subscription apps. You need a gateway, you need to be PCI compliant or use some sites like chargify, you need to start a company and most of the time you need to live in the US. And then there is Paypal, but this one has its bunch of horror stories too.

This is why I’m pretty excited by the Chrome WebStore as it looks super easy to charge for apps, you can see the live demo here

Anyway, I’ve decided to give it a try and it is indeed super easy to create chrome apps, those will appear on your new tab page.

To give a try you need to start your browser this way:

path/to/chromium-browser --enable-apps

Then you can try my HN App for chromium:

• Just click here to install it

The crx file is just a zip file, so you can download it and check its content if you want.

It only holds a “manifest.json” file and some icons. The manifest file looks like this:

{
      "name": "Hacker News",
      "version": "0.1",
      "icons": { "24": "y24.png", "128": "y128.png" },
      "launch": {
        "web_url": "http://news.ycombinator.com/"
      },
        "web_content": {
        "enabled": true,
        "origin": "http://news.ycombinator.com"
      }
    }

Then to create the crx file you need to do the following:

chromium-browser --enable-apps --pack-extension=path/to/chromiumapps/HN

OR

• open your extension tab, click on “Developer mode” and then click on “Pack extension”.

This will also create a pem file that contains a private key that will allow you to update your app. You cannot create apps with zip, probably because chromium uses the pem file to sign your app, I’m not positive about this though.

Anyway, the app tab looks like that:

And after clicking on the tab, it should open a special tab for HN:

That’s it, let’s wait and see how the webstore turns out!

Thanks to the guys on this thread

You can find more information chrome apps here"here":http://code.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/developers_guide.html

And don’t forget that Chrome apps are just web apps made easy to install, find and hopefully easy to charge for.

Posted on 2010-05-23 00:53:14 UTC

4 comments

Tags chromium, chrome, app, webstore, hn, tutorial