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."
Apple was planning to sue Google over stealing the Mac look & feel, and Google found out because Apple's lawyers were using Google to search for info.
...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.
You can see a working version (minus the images) at the google cache of the page. It is really neat. Sucks that it was taken down.
Would that just make the page #0000FF and all text #FFFFFF ?
*grin*
Is there a screen shot of the screen shot?
Ironically, this is still talked about on the Google's own Blog
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I wonder if them admitting that it was modeled after OS X quickened its demise. Maybe if they kept their mouths shut nobody would have said anything.
In case you have a good use for it, you can find the HTML here:
9 7173&st=40&p=585627099&#entry585627099
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=2
http://almostsmart.com
...would have been a lone picture of a smushed Morley cigarette.
The coolest voice ever.
Here is a fully functional mirror of Google X:
http://www.theplaceforitall.com/googlex/
Dashboard Widgets
here and
here
John Susek
There's a mirror here: http://googlex.foxified.info/, from someone in ATM at DSLR.
All your bases... belong to Apple Legal
Not easy to read or manage, but it sure downloads fast. And if you're serving it to a few million visitors a day, those add up fast in bandwidth savings.
A working cache of the original site is available over here
You're welcome
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Here's the mirrordot
There is a reason why the code looks like this: bandwidth. With the amount of people loading Google.com every day, even one character off their home page must make a significant difference.
Non Working Mirror of Page but it has a zip of all the files you need to run it locally, works too so I can still use it as my homepage. http://www.geocities.com/googlexmirror/
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 since Apple is apparently making a big deal out of searching interfaces and algorithms with it's forthcoming Spotlight technology in it's next operating system.
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"
Why all this about Apple's legal department? Google Labs says that sites will be pulled down if they're too intensive on the Google Labs server, and this was a VERY popular layout today. It's quite possible that that is the reason they pulled it down. I doubt Apple would threaten them over something like this.
I saw it when it was active, my reaction was about the same as when I saw the Magnification feature in the real MacOS X dock, "cool, now let me turn that off and never use it again."
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.
Quite possibly code re-coded. Ie it was obfuscated after the fact. Obfuscated might be a bad word, smallized might be a better one. ;)
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.
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.
How would zooming help your blind friend? AFAIK no matter how far you zoom, it doesn't get any clearer to people that can't see. Or am I missing a joke or something?
Before there were mirrors I created my own version of Google X using a script I found. It works more like an actual OSX dock because the images gradually get bigger as you move through them all.
http://shiwej.com/googlex/
JasonBlogs
I was able to get a full working mirror before it went down, it can be found here:
http://www.eaglescrag.net/Googlex/
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.
MSH
I attended a lecture by Peter Norvig, old-school AI researcher and now director of Google's search quality. He mentioned that occasionally they will try some new feature out by randomly showing it to 1% of their visitors, or showing it for a couple minutes, and seeing whether they get any positive or negative feedback. It seems like a pretty good idea. Between that and the nofollow attribute, they have a lot of very good out-of-left-field solutions to what could otherwise be viewed as *huge* CS/HI/business problems.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
Steve Jobs: What is on the agenda today?
Secretary: Well sir, while you were sleeping a Google employee wrote 9 lines of JavaScript and made a blog entry, which because everytime Google farts the world sniffs.., spead around the world through other blogs as world changing. However, because it linked to an external site Google took it down without explination cause they are all "mysterious" and better than other companies, and then someone said you did it on Slashdot and now we have a mob with pitch forks and torches outside 1 Inifinite Loop.
Steve Jobs: Pitch forks already? I haven't had my coffee yet!
There is a rage in me to defy the order of the stars, despite their pretty patterns.
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...
So, using CSS, someone could probably do it with a series of overlapping images, right, and just pop z-orders for the images as the mouse pointer approaches the "icon"? Or maybe use a clever image-scaling JavaScript function, possibly invoked by code that ensures only the icons adjacent to the pointer are being actively scaled (and let the browser move the pieces around), and not evaluating the entire strip of icons?
http://terminus.litz.org/googlex.tgz
The truth is out there. Or here: http://68.7.205.246:9500/googlex/Google.htm
1) Slashdot loves Apple.
h tml if you are curious).
/. news worthy. However, I'm not one that makes those kind of decisions.
2) Slashdot loves Google.
3) It looks kinda nifty.
4) It's not something most people expect HTML to be able to do.
I mean your same criticims apply to the actual dock. Tog (Bruce Tognazzini, founder of the orignal Apple Human Interface Group) did a writeup on the dock and complained about it as being a nice tech demo but not good for usability. One of the reasons was no labels on icons (http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.
However, seems clear in the case of Google it was just a tech demo. Some guy showing off some nifty stuff with DHTML. Doesn't look like Google was at all serious about actually using it as theri new interface. They've long maintaned a very simple, clean, compatible interface and this would break from that.
But ya, neat though it is, not sure it's front page
If anything, Apple is even more uptight about this sort of thing.
Google X was one of those ad-hoc projects that Google encourages its employees to get into. Which results in cool stuff, but also stuff that should have been run by the lawyers first.
Be Gentle
GoogleX screenie from yesterday. Icons grow when your mouse hovers above. Looks like it could be done with only CSS extensions... but i digress. Take it easy on my server /. haha
http://hoteats.net/googlex.jpg
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
http://www.iamcannabian.com/googlex/ has it! it even has a gmail link check it out!
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.
As there's cache of the images, anyone with a Web server could run this as their homepage at http://127.0.0.1/
Another thought: the icons could be recycled and used for ObjectDock (http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/) if only the goddamned thing wouldn't crash Explorer.exe so much...
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.