Google Releases Desktop Gadgets For Linux

mstrom writes "Google announced it has ported its Google Desktop Gadgets platform to Linux, making it the first cross-platform [desktop] gadgets framework. In a sign that Google is fully embracing the open source model, it admits the product is not feature-complete and has opened up the code base hosted on Google Code 'to give everyone a chance to tinker with the code powering the gadgets.' According to Google: "Gadget support is not just a single feature, but rather an entire platform for miniature applications.'"

Comments

What about Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you count Opera's widgets, this isn't the first cross-platform widget/gadget system.

Re:What about Opera?

[dsparil]

Plus, it runs on the most platforms; Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Symbian* and Windows Mobile*; and it's just vanilla HTML, JS and SVG zipped up.
*Once Opera Mobile 9.5 ships.

Re:What about Opera?

[Miladinoski]

Opera's proprietary (CLOSED) shit Have you even tried Opera? It indeed is proprietary, but not everything that is closed is shit, and Opera is just one proof of that. They had the biggest innovations in the browsers: First to include tabs, first to include mouse gestures, bookmarks nicknames (it took Firefox to come to its third version to implement this great feature), complete control over the browser with the keyboard, and so on...

it took them years to ditch the advertising Yes, this is one of the reasons why Opera's market share is low.

now they need to ditch the closed source and open it up. This has its ups and downs, and one of the downside is when they open their source, their paid version of Opera mobile maybe still paid, but with the source of Presto (the rendering engine of Opera's browsers) everyone with more skills could make its own version and give it for free, which means no salaries for the employees. I guess I don't have to speak about the ups of it, because I guess everyone probably knows them :)

Re:What about Opera?

[Count_Froggy]

Opera's widgets are a good thing, but they do not run under the OS, but within a web browser. The advantage of Google gadgets, Konfabulator, Karamba, or indvidual apps like Rainlendar is that they are available without needing to load a browser. As much as I like Karamba, I welcome another Open Source solution. There may be an opportunity to recognize that all gadgets ought to be runnable under a common framework. Anybody remember TSR's (early MSDOS/DRDOS/other variants days).

First X-platform? Really?

[GreyDuck]

the first cross-platform [desktop] gadgets framework

So, this Konfabulator thing I've been running for years isn't cross-platform after all? Thanks for clearing that up, Slashdot!

Re:Gagdets, Widgets, etc.

[Mascot]

Huge waste of resources? Waste, ok, but huge? The default sidebar thingiemajigs don't exactly drain a few CPU cores and gigs of ram.

Anyhoo, yes, some people do really use them (Yahoo's in my case). While I could perfectly well live without it, I do find having the free space of all my partitions readily visible, along with CPU, harddrive and network usage and some other tidbits to be handy. When I played Eve Online for a bit I also found the Eve skill/training monitor rather nice.

At work I find a world clock widget to be very useful when it comes to keep tracking of the local time at our various offices. Before we changed our presence system I also had a self-created widget that listed the activity and phone numbers of people key to whatever I was working on at the moment.

Sure, all this information is available elsewhere. It's just not as convenient as the always present always updated desktop widgets. It's not for everybody, but it does have its uses.

Re:Gagdets, Widgets, etc.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Do people really use them? I don't use any of the widgets on my Mac OSX system.

I used to be in the same boat as you. Right up until 10.5, widgets seemed to use up too many resources to make them worthwhile. Since 10.5, however, they are a lot better about being idle in the background, but still coming up quickly enough when desired. I regularly use the white and yellow pages widgets, a widget to track time I put in on various projects, a weather report widget, and a simple timer.

I think widgets are a reflection of improvements in multitasking and resource allocation. Back in the day, if I wanted to play a game at a LAN party, I shut down all my applications. I didn't leave applications sitting open unless I was actually using them. Since about version 10.2 of OS X, I never quit any of my applications that I use daily. I sure don't shut down my big, Adobe CS applications before playing a game. Better resource allocation has really changed the way I compute and Widgets are a reflection of that. Why not have a dozen small applications running in the background all the time, so long as they don't significantly affect performance? It is a lot more convenient than firing them up when needed, one by one. Mind you, there are a lot of useless Widgets and even some I thought I'd use (google maps) I don't because I generally have a Web browser open too. Still, I do think widgets are here to stay; especially for smartphones.

Re:Not feature complete

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Since when was "open source" just an excuse for releasing a half-finished product? Google is a multi-million-dollar company. Surely they can afford to pay some programmers and testers to produce a finished product before they release it?

Google's development methods are quite different than other companies. Many of these beta services and products they release are not something the company is using to make money, but are the individual projects of the engineers. Each engineer gets 20% of their time where they must work on their own thing. A lot of those "things" eventually get tossed out for the public to play with, usually as betas and often as OSS projects. Sure, Google could pay engineers to work on this full time, but it isn't clear that is really going to make them money. Linux on the desktop improvements aren't exactly a goldmine. Rather, I think it is nice they let the engineer donate this code to Linux and let people help him integrate it into Linux.

Re:Gagdets, Widgets, etc.

[3p1ph4ny]

For what it's worth, I think you're right. However, I've been using conky (http://conky.sourceforge.net/) forever, and I think it's great. That's about as close to gadgets as I come, though.

Apache license 2.0 ftw ;)

[junglee_iitk]

http://code.google.com/p/google-gadgets-for-linux/source/browse/trunk/COPYING

Re:Not feature complete

[Bandman]

No, it started as a pet project. Like Google Maps, which also produces income.

Re:Google gadgets?

[D Ninja]

That's because they want you to use their product - not one of the other dock apps that exist. That's just smart business strategy there. First, Google looks great because they are supporting Linux when so many big companies don't touch it with a ten foot pole. Second, they get the "common geek" using their tools/APIs/etc. And third, they get more mindshare which is huge for any company.

And, honestly, you could make this argument for any piece of open source software. Why do people make their own? Because they can. One of the best things about OSS.

Re:Gagdets, Widgets, etc.

[Knuckles]

Well then you missed at least these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperKaramba
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDesklets

Re:Google doesn't really port to linux

[Benley]

afaik, only Picasa for linux is the wine crap. google desktop and earth are native ports. Earth already used QT on windows so the port was probably easier than Picasa.

Re:Google gadgets?

[ZerdZerd]

You know it's open source, right? You can check if their spying on you by reading the code.