According to Francois Beaufort, who is Google’s “Happiness Evangelist,” the Chromium OS development team is working on something the company calls Athena.
Unfortunately, not much is known about Athena, though Beaufort does show off a screenshot, which you can see above. Here’s what he had to say about what the goal is with this new endeavor.
“Athena is a brand new project the Chromium OS team is experimenting with in order to bring a new kind of user experience,” Beaufort said. “As you can see below, the first draft consists in a collection of windows with some simple window management.”
Some of the comments below Beaufort’s post offer a little insight into what Athena could be. For instance, Michael Bond, who is a software developer according to his Google+ page, mentioned that the image resembled the multi-tasking view in Android L, which Google revealed during Google IO 2014. So far, the early reactions have been mixed. One commenter called it “amazing,” while another said it’s “awful.” Another referred to Athena as “cumbersome.”
I myself have no development chops, so it’s near impossible for me to tell what Athena could bring to the table just by looking at the “Work in Progress” page. Beaufort says that you can take a look at it yourself “by simply checking out the chromium source code and compiling the convenient “athena_main” target with ninja -C out/Release athena_main.”
If that means something to you, please feel free to chime in below and enlighten us.
