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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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..... for how easy creating these apps happens to be. If I were still teaching, I would likely use this as a means to teach basic programming skills. They also have something else going for them excellent documentation that is easily understood by my wife who is a non geek. To top it all off, it's using HTML, XML, and Javascript. Three open and accessible languages that are widely used on a variety of platforms.
Methinks that one of the reasons behind this is that they want to "embrace and extend." Sound familiar?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Yet you continue to come here, maybe it's time to get a life?
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.
I meta-moderate because I care.
...for that /. dupe eliminator module I've been working on.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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!!
Maybe now I can add some of the mor euseful widgets at My Yahoo! to the Google homepage... lik a stock ticker that does more than just US exchange, or a TV listings mondule for more than just US listings.
My Yahoo! has been way ahead of Google on this for some time, hopefully this will allow Google to catch up quicker by leveraging third-party developers.
I've been up all night writing a widget. Let me tell you this: the development environment is a pain in the arse. Using their developer widget, it gives you the option of not caching the various widgets. I tried using this tool to not cache mine (so I could reload easily and see changes to the code), but it didn't work reliably. Whenever you moved the widget around to a different spot, it would go to a new revision of the code... and it was almost never the latest revision. This was so frustrating. What I ended up doing was renaming my widget every revision (also a huge pain in the arse). I ended up renaming it over 40 times during the course of the night. Then you have to add the widget back to your personalized home and go through all the steps again. Blast. I'm not bitter :).
If you want to see the culmination of my night's work, plug this into the widget manager: http://andrewhitchcock.org/musicmobs/w.xml
My widget pulls data from musicmobs. You can look at similar artists or find interesting playlists. If you visit that page, you can upload your iTunes library to make the recommendations more accurate, and it gives you the ability to upload your own playlists (which then become visible in the widget). Check it out!
Andrew
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}At least the Slashdot editors post consistently wrong grammar...
:-)
it's != its
they're != theyre
I guess I've read this site for 6 years now, no change...
Now is the winter of our disco tent
I created a quick imageshack hosting widget. To give it a try add this link to the "Create a Section" spot. It is a really simple one, but for me is very useful. Imageshack hosting widget http://base.google.com/base/a/16800097909005850654
>IMHO a much better concept than just desktop widgets
yes because who wants to just press a button and have all their widgets instantly fade in? we want to have to open a compatible web browser, load the page, look up all the widgets, download the data...
can someone give me an example of a widget that is better in this way because being used to Apple's Dashboard widgets and using them many times every day it's hard for me to imagine why you would want them to be "...on the internet" except for their obviously patentable new nature.
Well, fortunately for the rest of us, you're not the final arbiter over the usage of the word widget.
According to Webster:
Apple uses the term widgets to define the components in it's dashboard application.
Hello, if you go to you personal page here on Slashdot, you'll find:
Over time widget has come to be a placeholder for actual objects (in examples of economics for example), any gadget, and it has also come to mean "small, componentized pieces of code".
Googles use of the word widget is consistent with currently accepted usage of the word. They haven't arbitrarily redefined it. They haven't even used it in a new context.
Get over it. It's not your word exclusively.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The API gives you access to a enterprise class web-crawler for one. And we're saying the same thing, you say content I say data and infrastructure. The content needs delivery and Google giving you access to their server farms to build your own custom logic on top of their services/information.
Shh.
Should have included the URL for the site :
weather.gov
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
This was amazingly easy. I setup a Widget at: http://witendofi.com/widgets/witendoficard.xml
It is a Google IG version of the WiFi Cards we let users have (see grebowiec.net for an example, it is in the right sidebar).
I had this thing working in under 10 minutes. I like. I will be expanding this. The timing was perfect, I actually started on a Konfabulator widget for this just last night!
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Agreed - the "personalized homepage" at google seems to be a very poor competitor WRT live.com. For example, adding or closing a "widget" in google.com/ig triggers a RELOAD of the page. live.com adds and removes them without reloading anything. Clicking in the "more content" in the content sidebar opens another web page. THe add buttons in that same side bar are ugly buttons not nice text links. live.com had a javascript RSS reader which supports images and google.com/ig added it later and it doesn't support images. Also, live.com is already translated to spanish
It's somewhat weird that being google the "ajax leader" microsoft has beaten google in this field.
Try this:
http://www.mavrinac.com/projects/wicwacwoe/google. xml
Quite possibly the most useless Google Homepage module available.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
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.
My blog
portability. This way you can get your widgets on whichever platform you're using, even if its not your normal one.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
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.
Hey, you asked for it
I disagree that C is the ideal learning language, but I agree that the primary importance of learning programming is learning how to think. I'm not even talking necessisarily about OOP concepts, but more generally how to define, approach, and break down problems.
On the other hand, I think the worst thing you could do to a completely green student is to sit them down with a text editor and and compiler. This will only attract people who want to program in the first place and are willing to "tough it out". A good teacher/tool should be able to engage people who wouldn't consider themselves programmers. The first language I learned was LOGO for the TRS-80 and I was instantly hooked - me and my brother tried to one-up each other's spirographs
LOGO is my favorite example of a teaching language. The syntax vocabulary is small and your feedback is entirely visual (at least starting out). At first you're just moving a turtle around and drawing spirograph-like patterns... the programming methodology is almost a passive, secondary experience.
That said, with computers and the net you have many exciting opportunities to teach programming. "Widgets" programming seems like it has promise (maybe not for 5-10 year olds, but probably jr. high and up), but even a campaign editor for Starcraft is basically a turing-complete "language" -- You still get to learn the concepts of a conditional statement, with the added bonus of blowing up aliens. Why not learn that way?