Slashdot Mirror
Google's X Files Vanish
An anonymous reader writes "News.com reports that Google's latest technology experiment paid tribute to Apple Computer, but the Mac OS X-themed version of the search king's Web site was taken down a day after its debut. Though that particular page was taken down, there is a screenshot here displaying how the icons were magnified as the mouse hovered over them."
...as others in many other forums today have, there is, at least at present, absolutely no proof that Apple legal necessarily did anything here. By all accounts, it was a project by an individual Google engineer that a manager liked enough to display publicly via Google Labs. The creator himself said it was the result of "a fun late-night coding jaunt to help me learn Javascript and DHTML." After other Google managers, executives, or legal staff saw it, there is a distinct possibility that Google itself pulled it because of anything from concerns over possible infringement, to the product not being approved by by the proper authorities before public consumption, to internal disagreement about the rollout process to Google Labs.
To those who may be so inclined to immediately blame Apple, I would say: wait until any facts in this particular instance actually support that position.
"a fun late-night coding jaunt to help me learn Javascript and DHTML."
Let's hope his variable naming conventions don't hold true for all of his development work... From source code:
k=document;v=Date;x=false;z=Array;af=Math.floor;ag =RegExp;b=new z(12);s=new z("null","web","images","groups","news","froogle", "local","scholar","video","maps","labs","more");aa =new z(11);ab=10;t=0;u=0;n=0;o=new v();h=5;m=385;c=0;w=x;var title;var firstHoverOccurred=x;m=385;p=0;function d(ac){c=ac;o=new v();setTimeout("gidle()",20);}function e(ac){c=0;w=x;o=new v();setTimeout("gidle()",20);}function ae(){for(var j=1;j35){b[i]-=h;if(b[i]'}else{var y=(c-7)*70+70;title.innerHTML=''+k.getElementById( imagename).alt}}b[c]+=h;p=1;if(b[c]>70){b[c]=70}l+ =b[c];if(l70){b[c]=70}l=m}var g=af(255-255*(b[c]-35)/35);title.style.color="rgb( "+g+","+g+","+g+")";imageElem.width=b[c];imageElem .height=b[c];k.getElementById(imagename).src=s[c]+ ".gif"}m=l;var ad=new v();ab=ad.getTime()-o.getTime();o=ad;t+=ab;u++;n=t /u;h=5;if(u>4){if(n>30){h=10}if(n>60){h=15}if(n>90 ){h=20}}if(p){setTimeout("gidle()",20);p=0}}
A working cache of the original site is available over here
You're welcome
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Some guy noodling around in his 20% time to profess his love for OS X hardly seems like something the legal department (or any damn department) should concern themselves with.
Then again, I've had a few beers and can imagine the world, with a few minor tweaks, being perfect like that.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Just host the code locally on your drive and bookmark Google to it. Then you can enjoy it as your Google homepage for now on.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
From the google cache page: "Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you." Sure hope Apple didn't yell at them, after such a nice complement. I don't own any Apple products but they seem like a cool, hip, and forgiving company. This would change my perspective of them, much like when Google went after XGoogle.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
But why would Google be "warning" Apple? Spotlight is for searching data on your computer, not the Internet. And Google's desktop search app only exists on Windows. It's not as if the two are in competition when it comes to searching.
I did the same thing by accident years ago when I resized the icons on a web page I was working on, but forgot to resize the mouseover images.
Mod me down, do whatever you want, just because I'm not impressed every time Google jumps.
Part of the goodness of Google is how simple it is.
I'm sorry but I don't associate a compass with local searches, The word Local is much better, I can read 10 links in the same time it takes to move the mouse over 1 icon to figure out what it does.
It's just a script-trick. Yes it's fun, yes it's good looking, no it's not accessable or bandwidth friendly. It's not even that well coded.
This is just another stupid trick but because it's Google it gets press attention?
Frankly, that's kind of silly. There are a lot more cutting edge things floating around out there than images that resize when you roll over them.
It's flamebait becauas you're jumping to an unjustified conclusion. There's no evidence that anyone from Apple was involved in the takedown. Yes, sometimes it seems Apple sues everything in sight, but to say that "Apple sucks for doing this" is not warranted at this juncture.
Not everyone who is "legally blind", is "totally blind".
While I don't think the demo was intended to be accessible, larger images and text DO help vision impared people...
Precedents aside, the look and feel of software is not always separate from the functionality. The function of a lot of software these days is to make hard things easy, and much of that has to do with the GUI.
And should it become known that Apple WAS responsible for this, will you then apologize and say "yup, he was right, Apple does suck for doing this?".
As you yourself noted, Apple has now accumulated a reputation for "suing everone in sight"; isn't that reputation their own fault? And aren't people justified somewhat in suspecting Apple to be at fault here, BECAUSE of that litigious reputation of theirs?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
A bit melodramatic, I think. It's a themed webpage, not the moral compass of the internet. Get over it.
I think a lot of bad ideas are actually good ideas made to do things they aren't suited for. Rollerskates are a great idea for moving from one end of the neighborhood to another, but pain if what you're spending all your time going up and down the staircase from the first floor to the fifth.
The dock is a great idea for a launcher for a small, fixed handful of applications. It makes efficient use of space, it gives feedback about what you are about to do (when you click, it's the big one that be launched). I can imagine how well the original demos went. It's all the other stuff the dock is forced to do, like tell you about the state of your session, that are a bad idea.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Explain to me how Google is a monopoly? People use it because they prefer it, not because they have no choice, big difference.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
'Cause you always read about those abuse of power stories where Google uses their dominance to prevent competitors from entering the market.
Or uses their massive amount of cash on hand to buy out potential competitors.
Or leverages tie ins with computer manufacturers so that Google comes pre-installed on all new pc computers.
Because it is so hard to type alltheweb.com or yahoo.com instead of google.com into the address bar of the browser.
And Firefox claims that it "can't render yahoo.com or msn.com correctly so you should probably not use that website."
Damn Google! If only they had some competition to keep search engine technology on the edge. Striving to always improve and do new and better things. What a world that would be!
I thought that Google had doctored up this obvious territorial infringement on the Mac OS X desktop as a warning shot fired across Apple's bow...
Hmm, yeah. The menacing threat conveyed by the Google X tagline certainly backs up your theory: "Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you."
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
The "genie effect" is bad UI design because it makes the "clickable hotspot" for doing something change shape/size and move depending on how you found it.
For instance: on the toolbar, if you start from the left side, and mouse over the growing/shrinking icons, then move *straight up* off the toolbar, you will have left a certain large icon. When it shrinks, you may no longer be directly above that same icon any more, so if you move *straight down* again, you'll land on a different icon.
This is precisely why Apple's "stoplight" maximize/minimize/close buttons appear on the upper-left side of the window title-bar, so if the window resizes while you're getting ready to click one of them, they don't move out from under your feet.
Countelss Windows applications have done this to me, where a dialog box auto-resizes just enough to place the close button where the minimize button used to be. Even Nero used to replace a "Next>" button with a "Close" button in the same spot in their interface, just to make things dicey.
Sure, it's fancy eye-candy, but having deterministic GUI clickable elements I believe is more important.