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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.
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
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}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
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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