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Google Adds Widgets to Homepage
Panaphonix writes "Google announced that their personalized homepage now has an API for developers to add their own modules. Samples are available in this directory."
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Odd to see Google doing the me-too thing. As soon as I saw the clock widget I knew the API was gonna be the now-standard HTML/XML/Javascript format used by Konfabulator/Yahoo, Apple and (I assume) Microsoft. So what does Google bring to the party? I guess these widgets live on web servers rather than users’ hard drives, but that of course ties them into the browser window. Perhaps we can expect them to put out an executable soon that will let them exist outside the browser (and thus be fully useful), but that puts them at merely the same point the others are at.
Why the hell is everybody so hot and bothered about Widgets all of a sudden? I bought a Konfabulator license way back when, and pressing F12 brings up Apple’s Dashboard, yet I still check wunderground.com to see if the weather will be cooperating with my athletic endeavours a few hours into the future. Granted, I was one of those who thought the iPod was no big deal, but Widgets have been with us in their modern incarnation for a few years now, and world+dog still doesn’t seem to give a damn. Makes me think they really are just trying to keep up with the rest of the pack on this one.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
With this Google is continuing to move in the all-the-info-you-need-in-one-place direction, also known as a web portal. They are doing it in their cool and effective ways, but that's where they seem to be going.
wait until you have better things than a clock and "ColorJunction". Everyone's personalized google homepage will look like a webdesign 101 student who just learned how to cut 'n paste javascript.
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1st step free froogle and free listing of products
2nd step widgets
3rd step pool of programmers who can program widgets
4th step services with available pool..
5th step show me money!!
Oh please, lets stop that praises, and call this what it is, a copy/rip off of Microsoft live.com gadgets.....
Call me an old-fashioned nit-picker, but I still think that for people who will need to write serious programs, writing 20-line programs in C is the right way to learn basic programming skills. User-interface design etc can wait until people understand how to interate over a table, how to do arithmetic, and most importantly how to convert ideas about solutions to computer code. I've seen CS students who were started on OOP in Java (or C++). Of course the Profs found OOP cool and important, but this meant the students had to deal with software design issues (which is what OOP is all about) before they understood how to write a function that accomplished something. Once you've learned how to program (in C, Fortran, or LOGO for that matter), you can start thinking about user-interface issues, program design issues, efficiency of algorithms, etc. But the bottom-up approach to learning how to programming works better than the top-down style.
\end{rant}Come on now. Don't go the Microsoft route. Microsoft blatantly ripped of Apple's Dashboard. Anyone in their right mind would know that Apple was the One True inventor of widgets. ;)
What is open about Google ? Their main product is their search engine, and yet Amazon's (a retailer) search engine platform (Alexa) is more open than Google. Infact, Google's openness is like a little demo, while Alexa is the real deal, where anyone can create their own search engine.
Google is an out and out content company which has roughly a dozen services, none of which can be reasonably used in any commercial application.
Anyone can compete with Google...all you need is a geek, a computer, a web host and some knowledge about web development.
The keyword here is optional. For anyone who has setup and checked out the personalized google page, they will notice that nothing on these page is forced upon the user. You have the preference to put as much or as little as you want on the personalized portal. I've been hearing the same concerns and exaggerated worry since google started implementing this feature. Doesn't seem like much has changed and while I agree with your sentiment that a lot of google's appeal is in the simplicity of their search page, as http://search.yahoo.com/ and http://search.msn.com/ have thankfully modeled, I don't believe this will be the turning point of seeing a flood of html and javascript on google's page forced upon anyone.
Turn based strategy game that runs over XMPP. Phalanx
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Most people who think that C is low level, grungy programming language haven't written a lick of C code and couldn't write anything significant in C if their life depended on it.
C has very simple syntax. The language doesn't get in your way, and once you want to start doing OO, you can pick up C++ fairly easily once you know C.
One of the problems of learning a language like python first, is that it doens't teach you anything about proper dynamic memory allocation, the use of pointers, the use of operating system APIs, etc.
Scripting languages like Python are nice, but you'll never learn anything about systems-level programming writing things in Python, so, for example, your hands will be tied when new hardware comes along until us C programmers come along and write a library for you to access its driver.
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*sigh* Geeks, geeks, geeks.
Your first mistake is *assuming* that people who program want to be programmers. The people who are going to be creating Google widgets DO NOT want to be programmers. They want to create something cool for themselves. Everybodies language suggestion revolves around the user ending up as a career programmers (sooner or later).
I never use Google/ig, because the precise reason I started using Google (in addition to their better search) was that I was sick of "portals", where every square inch of screen space had to be taken up with something. From the moment I first visited Google, I knew I was looking at something better, because the Google folks decided that they didn't need to tart their site up to look like all those awful circa-1997 portals. Go look at http://www.excite.com/, because that's where we're all headed...*again*. The only difference is that now it's customizable with JavaScript instead of lots of server-side stuff.
No, thank you; I'll stick with regular old google.com or better yet, the Google search bar built into Firefox.
The best interface is no interface.
Well see, the fact that the discussion has side-tracked into a C-Python-Basic-whatever language, even though the only tools that a Google Widget designer will have is the ones provided by the browser. Simply shows the difference between geeks and everyone else. Geeks aren't primarily interested in the ends, but the means. And in fact will forget there ever was an ends, lost in all the detours they are. Everyone else are interested primarily in the ends, and the means as something they grudgingly have to learn, to accomplish them.
Since this is primarily a geek site, one can expect all these detours when a technical discussion comes up. But for those aiming for the ends, it's a rather empty discussion. What good are these Google widgets? What can you create with them? Ends people, ends.
I don't think this has anything to do with Konfabulator. I think the point is to keep people away from live.com. A good thing, too, because I was just about to force myself to learn Microsoft's strange (and poorly documented) gadgets API.
I switched to My Yahoo! when they opened their portal to RSS. Now, I'll probably switch to Google's portal.
The trick to getting people like me to use your portal is to provide ways of getting my content into your page.