Trying Chrome Web Store

Two days ago Google released their Chrome app store which is intended to provide a common source of apps for both the Chrome browser and the newChromeOS powered devices

And I wondered how easy or uneasy it would be to put up an app for the Chrome ecosystem, and the anwser is: Do you have a web service? you are done.

Yes? yes

Yesterday, a friend of mine said Chrome apps are nothing but bookmarks. but there is a bit more, there is a thin layer of candy consisting on: discovery, ratings, feedback, simplified payment gateway, plattform shared customer trust…

The process is quite straightforward if you go to http://code.google.com/intl/es-ES/chrome/apps/docs/developers_guide.html and follow the instructions there.

All you need is:

• An icon, best is 96×96 PNG with transparent border until 128×128 pixels.

• An screenshot proportional to 800×550.

• A manifest file like:

 1 {
 2   "name": "Oinak",
 3   "description": "Subscribe to «Oinak on the Web»",
 4   "version": "1.0.1",
 5   "icons": { "128": "128.png" },
 6   "app": {
 7     "urls": [ "http://oinak.com/" ],
 8     "launch": { "web_url": "http://oinak.com/" }
 9   },
10   "permissions": []
11 }

Then you have to put the PNG icon and the manifest into a folder into a Zip that you upload, upload the screenshot, pay the one time 5 bucks developer fee, and validate (through the webmaster tools) that you own the url the app points to, via a metatag, an uploaded file, a DNS change and a couple other options.

And voilá in a minute you have: A shiny chrome app

If you want to see the whole thing, fork me at https://github.com/oinak/oinak_app