As you may have heard, in the midst of WWDC’s endless non-controversy over Dashboard vs. Konfabulator (no one here has been protesting, compared to the endless hijacks I’ve seen on other sites), Apple announced a little Gadget contest.
Having a decent HTML and CSS background, and some antiquated recollection of Javascript, I decided to code what is the obligatory gadget, a Google search gadget named “GooGa”. The API is not difficult, and only working between the holes in my Javascript memory and some poor debugging info in Tiger.
Brief feature list:
- Searches Google, Google Images, Google Groups, Google News, Froogle, and even gmail. (Note that you need to be logged into gmail before you try to search.)
- Saves to preferences which Google site you were last searching.
- Uses the new search widget to allow for previous search storing and placeholder text, as well as a thrilling newly-support transparency CSS attribute.
- Uses the whizzy “showEditTransition” to show about information, and if I continue to code it, preferences.
- Blends in reasonably well with the other gadgets; ie, it’s not ugly.
“GooGa” isn’t just a shortened version of “Google Gadget”, it’s also symbolic of this being a sort of “first words spoken”. I enjoyed working with the Gadget API a lot, and I can honestly say that there’s lots of potential here for anyone with some passable CSS/JS knowledge to do really nice little desk accessorries. I’m certainly planning on other tools – perhaps a very quick and simple blogging client, or a VJ Army score input gadget…the sky is the limit, and I’m getting that programmer’s rush.
Download GooGa 1.0 (17k)
Important Note: I’ve already found a bunch of things I could fix. I will have a 1.1 release this weekend.