Google acquires Labpixies

Not everyone likes to start their day with just a search box and logo (no matter how cool it is!). Many users want email, videos, news, weather, games, and other information to be at their fingertips each time they open up a browser window. We launched iGoogle in 2005 to address this need by providing a truly personalized homepage with access to any RSS feed and well over a hundred thousand gadgets.

One of the first developers to create gadgets for iGoogle was Labpixies. Over the years, we worked closely together on a variety of projects, including the launch of a number of global OpenSocial based gadgets. Recently, we decided that we could do more if we were part of the same team, and as such, we're thrilled to announce the acquisition of Labpixies.

The team will be based in our ever-growing Tel Aviv office and will anchor our iGoogle efforts across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. We are looking forward to working with Labpixies to develop great web apps and leverage their knowledge and expertise to help developers and improve the ecosystem overall.

In the meantime, have fun trying to beat me at Flood-It!

By Don Loeb, iGoogle Team

Hello to orkut Developers!

As we announced in the last update to the former orkut Developer Blog last week, henceforth we’ll be posting all orkut developer updates to this blog.

We think this is also a good opportunity to quickly introduce the newly-launched Developer page to you. We recently added this feature to the orkut sandbox which we hope to be a one-stop solution for developers looking to manage their applications from a single page and view their stats. You can submit your apps directly from here and verify them to complete the submission process. You can also maintain your apps from here and migrate them to a new URL, or delete them entirely from the directory. And if you have applications that have already been approved and included in the directory, expand their details to track the number of installs, uninstalls, renders and other useful stats updated every week.

Here’s what it looks like in action:


Please note that the Developer page requires you to be on the new orkut UI to work.

So keep your apps coming and point your browser to the one page to manage them all: sandbox.orkut.com/Main#Developer. And stay tuned for all orkut updates right here on the Google Code Blog!

By Prashant Tiwari and Ridhima Kedia, orkut Team

Coming soon: Gmail contextual gadgets available for trusted testers

At Campfire One this week we announced that we will soon open Gmail contextual gadgets as a new extension point for developers. These gadgets can smartly draw information from the web and let users perform relevant actions based on the content of an email message, all without leaving the Gmail inbox. For instance, contextual gadgets currently available in Gmail can detect links in emails to show previews of documents, videos, photos, and more, right inside the messages.

For businesses, Gmail contextual gadgets can boost employee productivity by complementing email in a context-specific and actionable way. Appirio, a cloud solution provider, provided a demonstration of the potential of Gmail contextual gadgets and other experimental features
with their new product PS Connect:



Soon we’ll be opening Gmail contextual gadgets as an extension for trusted testing by developers. If you have a good idea for this type of gadget today, please fill out this form. And for those of you who will be attending Google I/O in May, be sure to check out our session on building Gmail contextual gadgets.

By Dong Chen, Gmail Contextual Gadgets team

The gift of gadgets

The holidays always mean a lot of traveling for me -- traveling to the airport, to stores, to Grandma's house, and all over town.

Getting from Point A to Point B has always been easy on Google Maps. Simply click on "Get Directions" and you're on your way - whether by car, by foot or by public transit (in select cities). Now with our new directions gadget, you can bring driving and walking directions powered by Google Maps right to your website.

With the gadget, the days of manually typing and updating multiple blocks of text directions are over. By copying and pasting a single line of code, any website can offer customized door-to-door directions to their users. Users can then print directions with a single click. Did you know that you can now print directions with embedded maps and Street View images? This video shows you how.

This gadget is perfect for any webmaster wishing to direct users to a physical location - this means businesses both large and small. Some partners already using this gadget include major airports (Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport), universities (Stanford University), amusement parks (Legoland California), and restaurants (Emeril Lagasse's restaurants), to name just a few.

Below is a version of the gadget to play with that provides directions to Google's San Francisco office. If you would like to add this directions gadget to your site, visit our gadget creation page to quickly make your own!

PS: Providing directions from Google Maps is pretty flexible; in addition to run-of-the-mill addresses, you can give your site visitors directions to everything from a generic ZIP code to a specific set of lat-long coordinates for any of your locations.

Examples:
123 River St, Woods, MA
90210
42.06782,-71.756963

But with great power comes great responsibility. You might want your visitors to end up at your coordinates, but that doesn't mean they'll understand what a mess of numbers means when they see it in your list of addresses. The key is to give the address an alias, or a name that everyone will understand. You can do this by putting the alias in parentheses just after the address:

42.06782,-71.756963 (Grandma's House)

Add an alias to as many of your addresses as you like, or feel free to leave it off the easier ones; it doesn't hurt for your visitors to know where they're going. After all, you want them to remember how to come back for a second visit…

Posted by Julie Zhou, Product Marketing Manager

iGoogle launches canvas view

By Dan Holevoet, Developer Programs

We're happy to announce the launch of the canvas view feature to iGoogle users in the U.S., rolling out over the course of the day.  The canvas view feature allows gadget developers to build richer content, games, and UI for iGoogle's tens of millions of users by allowing them to build powerful full-page applications. In addition, canvas view provides developers with the opportunity to monetize their gadgets.



To get started, check out the documentation and examples on the iGoogle developer website. The site includes detailed information about iGoogle as well as information on upcoming OpenSocial functionality.

Try out the updated version of iGoogle and check out some of the great canvas view gadgets developers have already built.

Google Developer Courses on YouTube

By Stephanie Liu, Google Developer Programs

Wow, it's been nearly 4 months since we started the Google Developers channel on YouTube! We wanted a place to post talks, announcements, interviews, and anything else that might interest outside developers (and other fans). Now, we're building out more tutorial / lecture content -- something that hobbyists and seasoned programmers can watch to get their feet wet with our products.

We know that one of your New Year's resolutions must be to learn a new API, so check out our first videos on Gadgets and Google Data:

Three videos about Getting Started with Gadgets by "the Dans" (Daniel Lee and Daniel Holevoet):


An Introduction to Google Data by Jeff Fisher:


We're just getting started, so subscribe to the Google Developer Courses playlist for updates. There are many ways for you to keep up to date:

You can subscribe through YouTube by clicking the "Subscribe" link here:
http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=GoogleDevelopers.

Or, add the playlist directly into Google Reader or iGoogle:


Finally, you can also put the Google Data feed into your reader of choice: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/playlists/A930398A6117E70C

Let us know what you think! If there are any particular tutorials you'd like to see, post a comment below.

Google Gadgets going cross-platform

By Mike Pinkerton, Software Engineer

For about two years now, people have been writing gadgets for Google Desktop on
Windows and for iGoogle on the web. Today, with the announcement of Google
Gadgets for Mac OS X, Google Desktop users on the Mac can now run the same
Windows and web-based gadgets in Apple's Dashboard with zero (or very few)
changes. Check it out for yourself.

Google Gadgets for the Mac uses WebKit's JavaScript engine inside Dashboard, so
the majority of gadgets just work if they're written properly. The rest can be
fixed by following a few guidelines:

• Use JavaScript, not JScript
• WebKit is case-sensitive, JScript is not, which can lead to problems if you assume can you do things like interchange SetTimeOut() and setTimeout().
• Avoid JScript-only features like collections and ActiveX.
• Avoid IE-specific DOM extensions, just as if you were writing a multi-browser web application.
• Avoid Windows-specific APIs
• You shouldn't assume ActiveX or certain DLLs are available. Neither WebKit nor Mac OS X supports ActiveX, so these gadgets must be rewritten.
• Avoid Windows-only APIs such as Google Talk. These APIs are not (yet) available on Mac OS X.
• Understand how Dashboard is different
• The Dashboard environment is very different from a web page or the Desktop sidebar on Windows in that it comes and goes as the user activates it. Don't rely on your gadget always being visible. Your gadget won't run or update when Dashboard isn't in the foreground.
• Don't rely on access to the file system. The security model for Dashboard doesn't allow arbitrary file access to the hard disk, although your gadget does have access to files in its own archive. Things like file pickers won't work. Note that while restricted file system access is a departure from how gadgets work on Windows, it's consistent with Dashboard's security model and the behavior of other widgets developed for Mac OS X.

For more details, see Writing a Cross-Platform Gadget, part of the Desktop Gadget API documentation.

If you're interested in developing your own gadget, visit the Gadgets API homepage. If you're already a gadget developer, download the beta today to test your gadget and ensure that it works correctly.

Introducing Calendar Gadgets

By Michael Bolin, Google Calendar Team

You've seen them on iGoogle, in IBM WebSphere Portal, and now you can find them in your favorite online calendar -- that's right, now we're supporting Gadgets in Google Calendar! If you're a Scorpio like me, you can add this gadget that lets you check your horoscope from your calendar (don't worry, all the signs of the zodiac are supported). And if astrology isn't your thing, how about games? This Sudoku gadget was created by Alex Komoroske, one of our interns on the Docs & Spreadsheets team. If you add the gadget, you'll see that the daily puzzles get harder throughout the week.

Finally, if you like to keep up on celebrity birthdays, the birthday reminder will show you who you are idolizing that day:



But you don't have to be a Googler to create a Calendar Gadget -- we have put together new documentation to help you get your favorite Gadgets into Calendar. If you are itching to write some code, then you can use GData or ICAL to add some fancy Calendar Gadget events to your calendar. But if you're out of Red Bull and don't have the time for a late-night hacking session, then you may want to try our new "of-the-day" Calendar Gadget wizard, which makes it easy to take an existing Google Gadget and have it show up once a day, every day, just like the Horoscope and Sudoku Gadgets do.

Let us know how your experiences with Calendar Gadgets are going in the Google Calendar GData API developer forum.

Google Developer Podcast Episode Five: Adam Sah on Google Gadgets

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

Using iTunes?

The Google Gadget Ventures announcement was very exciting for us and the community. We couldn't wait to get Adam Sah of the Google Gadgets team to discuss Gadgets, and the new announcement.

Interview with Adam Sah on Google Gadget Ventures

What will you learn from this interview?

• What Google Gadgets actually are and how they compare to widgets and blidgets and blodgets and ....
• How there is a family of Gadgets. They aren't just for iGoogle!
• How you can develop Gadgets in HTML, Flash, Java applets, and more. After all, this is just iframes people.
• The security model with Gadgets
• The subtlety behind phishing and Gadgets
• The long tail of Gadgets, and how to share and promote your Gadgets
• How you can post Gadgets on your blog or website
• How we are in the second generation of Gadgets (not just a minimal view on your web app)
• What an appropriate amount of resources to put on Gadgets
• How to monetize your Gadgets
• Information about the Google Gadget Ventures program
• How to get going with the scratchpad in seconds
• How Mapplets are Gadget too
• How this is about real business (IBM and Salesforce.com)
• How to deal with high volume Gadgets, and how we are here to help.
• The role and timing of standardization of the gadget platforms

Read more about Google Gadgets, and check out the forum.

Start listening now

You can download the episode directly, or subscribe to the show (click here for iTunes one-click subscribe).

News

The following are links that we mentioned in the podcast:

AppleScripting Google Desktop means that you can tell the Google Desktop application to do things for you via script. Boss around the system from your own applications and scripts.

The new Google Earth Outreach program has some tutorials such as showing you how to create KML from a spreadsheet.

The Google Mashup Gallery is a mashup itself, that allows you to add your mashup to the mix. Now, everyone will be able to find your Britney vs. Christina mashup!

Geotagged Picasa JSON/KML Output + Driving Directions = Instant Scenic Tours: If you were following the Google blogs yesterday, you would have heard that Picasa now gives you a sleek drag+drop interface for geotagging your photos, and that the Picasa Google data API now outputs the geotagged data using GeoRSS & GML elements. And if you were excited by all that news and immediately visited Picasa to try out the new feature, you might have noticed the big blue KML icon next to a "View in Google Earth" hyperlink. So Picasa now gives developers geotagged photo data both in KML output and the standard Google data API output formats, and that means we map developers have a lot of ways to start playing around with Picasa photos.

New drag-to-route driving directions in google maps - once you have a route, drag the blue line around to have it automatically re-route using your desired roads or intermediate destinations.

World Cup Cricket 2007: Don't pray for rain

Posted by Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs



If ever cricket lovers needed an excuse to take a trip to the Caribbean, now they have one. The Cricket World Cup 2007 has started today, and it should be a great party. (I myself am a Brit who will hopefully not be praying for rain.)

Once again, the developer community has outdone itself creating useful mashups. The Radioactive Yak has detailed a few of the resources available which include:

• A Google Gadget module that shows the current games on a map of the area
• A Google Earth tour of the venues via a World Cup 2007 Venues KML file
• An up-to-date game schedule on a Google Calendar.

Google India has also made a site available at http://www.google.co.in/cricket with useful tools of its own:

• World cup news gadget
• World cup scores gadget
• A blogging contest for the event
• And much more. Visit the site to participate

Convert Google Gadgets to Other Widget Platforms

Post by Dann Lee, Associate Support Engineer

The Google Gadgets directory contains thousands of gadgets you can use on various google.com sites. In October 2006, we released Google Gadgets For Your Page, allowing you to embed your favorite gadgets in your blogs, websites, and other webpages. Now you can take Google Gadgets and convert them to run in your Windows Vista Sidebar or Mac OS X Dashboard. With the use of third-party utility applications, this is trivial to do.

Mesa Dynamics offers a free widget converter application called Amnesty Generator which converts Google Gadgets to Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets. On February 2nd, they announced a public beta release that's capable of converting Google Gadgets to Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets as well. This increases distribution of Google Gadgets further and gives gadget authors access to an even wider audience. In addition to Amnesty Generator, Widgetops Universal Google Gadget Widget is a Mac OS X Dashboard Widget that converts Google Gadgets to run on the dashboard.

Viewing Google Gadgets on different sites or platforms does not require any changes. The answer to the question "Why should I write a Google Gadget?" is hopefully becoming more and more clear as rendering platforms become increasingly available, which now includes:

• Google Personalized Homepage
• Google Gadgets For Your Webpage (anywhere on the web)
• Google Page Creator
• Google Desktop
• Windows Vista Sidebar (converter)
• Mac OS X Dashboard (converter, dashboard widget converter)

For more information on creating gadgets, visit Google Gadgets API.