Author: Dan Dickinson

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.

There’s an automated “transfer your settings from another machine via Firewire” tool that launches when you start the machine for the first time.
There’s a feature for .mac members to have domains of the style (machine).(user).members.mac.com map to their IP addresses.
Safari’s RSS support, while nice and clean, is a horrible way to read articles because (at least, for now), it’s just an alternative to viewing the main site. You have to click a button while at the page, and you flip to an RSS view. That’s ridiculous.
That said, the use of the summarize service to control the length of excerpts is fantastic and a convincing reason that EVERYONE NEEDS TO PROVIDE A FULL FEED.
More as I find it.