Halloween Gadgets

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer

With October 31st looming, it's time to decorate your desktop with spooky gadgets. Here are three new ones you can try out.

	Halloween Pumpkin By Benjamin Schirmer Create a custom jack-o'-lantern on your desktop. To change the look of your Halloween pumpkin just click the eyes, nose, or mouth. Beware: sometimes this pumpkin makes spooky noises!
	Halloween CountDown Gadget By Vishnu.S If you can't wait until Halloween � and you don't have a child reminding you how very long it is until trick-or-treat time � you need this.
	Spooky Clock By Lahiru Lakmal Priyadarshana Every day is Halloween when this clock is on your desktop. The pendulum swings back and forth, reminding you that the witching hour is never too far away...

You can find these and more at our holiday gadgets page. If you feel inspired to create your own holiday gadgets, visit our Developer Site and be sure to grab the Google Desktop SDK.

Happy Halloween from the Google Desktop Team!

JRuby on Rails?

Rails has been running on JRuby for some time. I know the development team has used that as one of their benchmarks for Ruby compatibility. But check out this post from one of my fellow Sun employees. Basically what the graph shows is over time, Rails runs about the same speed on Java as it does on C. Very interesting.

Add to that great Ruby support in Netbeans 6.0 (due out in a month) and the ability to deploy Rails applications to Java application server. Things get very interesting indeed! Methinks Ruby will be getting a closer look in the enterprise.

Mona Lisa Smile

Earlier this week I found this story on some scientific research done on the Mona Lisa. Much like the Sistine Chapel, the researcher thinks the original painting was quite a bit more colorful than the one we see today. Here is a link to a picture comparing the original and his color restored version.

Featured Gadget: Time Around the World

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer

This blog periodically features a Google Desktop gadget and a quote from someone who uses it. If you'd like to recommend a gadget, send an email to desktop-gadgets AT google DOT com.

Jaime Brands of Google Sydney says: "For my work, I need to know the time in Auckland, San Francisco, Dublin, Hyderabad and Perth. I also need to know what time it is where friends and family are located around the world. This is a handy gadget that sits on my desktop and allows me to see the time in selected cities, and also allows me to compare time differences between cities when calendaring meetings."

If you'd like to create your own gadgets, then read about how this gadget was made and check out the new Gadget Designer.

More information | Download gadget

RSS Feeds Your Friend on the iPhone

A quick tip I thought I should share with iPhone users out there. Although an iPhone can surf "real" web pages, in practice this can often be slow and frustrating. The problem seems to have more to do with Flash advertisements timing out than actual bandwidth issues with Wifi or the Edge network. Many web pages simply won't finish loading.

The solution, bookmark links to RSS and Atom URLs in Safari. That way, you can peruse the information, and pick only the stories you really want to read. The iPhone Safari browser has an RSS reader built in. It actually displays the stories in a very readable font and makes the scanning of stories very convenient.

You can actually manage the bookmarks using the Safari browser on the computer you are syncing your iPhone with. It took me a while to figure this out as it wasn't obvious to me that the bookmark syncing was taking place. But once you know that, it is very easy to surf the web with Safari on your Mac or PC and manage the bookmarks from there. Beats the heck out of trying to type on that tiny keyboard. It also makes the iPhone much faster and more useful while waiting in line at Starbucks.

Google Desktop for Linux 1.1 Beta

Posted by Jim Zhuang, Software Engineer

When we released the first version of Google Desktop for Linux this past June, we signaled a commitment to the Linux community: to develop for the platform and to support our Linux users. Since then, we have been hard at work to improve and refine our product. Today, we'd like to share what we've created by releasing Google Desktop for Linux 1.1 Beta.

Feedback from people like you shaped this update. Because many people wanted to search and launch applications, we added that functionality to the product. Desktop for Linux now supports many more image formats and will show better thumbnails for them in your search results. You can also customize the hotkey used to launch the quick search box. And most importantly, Desktop for Linux now searches the content of Microsoft Office documents - our most requested feature.

Please download the latest version and give it a spin. We hope you like it.

Campaign Contributions Sites

If you are interested in knowing who contributes to who in the coming US elections, check out the following sites:

http://www.politicalbase.com/ - The site has a nice celebrity section that is kind of fun to look through.

http://www.opensecrets.org/ - This site has been around a long time and does a detailed analysis by candidate.

iGoogle meets Desktop gadgets

Posted by Ryan Tabone, Product Manager

We've often asked ourselves why Google Desktop Gadgets are confined to just the desktop and sidebar. With Google Desktop 5.5 Beta, we've decided to change that. In addition to improved Outlook search functionality, Google Desktop now lets you run Desktop gadgets on your iGoogle homepage. And that means you can check your wireless signal, grow a beautiful plant, or play music right from iGoogle.


The process for adding Desktop gadgets to your iGoogle homepage is simple. Just surf over to the iGoogle Content Directory and find the gadgets you want to add -- for example, try adding the media player gadget by clicking on the "Add it now" button on this page. If you already have Desktop 5.5 installed, you'll get the gadget without having to do anything more. If you don't, you'll be offered a streamlined Google Desktop with only the gadget functionality enabled. You can decide later whether you want to try out some of the other great features of Google Desktop, such as searching the contents of files, emails and web history.

With Desktop 5.5, you can also have multiple instances of a gadget on your desktop. Simply open up the "Add gadgets" menu and choose to add an existing gadget again. Also, make sure to press the Ctrl button twice to check out the svelte new look of the Quick Search Box.

Additionally, we've updated the gadgets button, which you can use to quickly see all your new gadgets!


As always, please let us know what you think.

Sun Scripting Page

Was asked in e-mail today to link to the new scripting home page for us on sun.com. The new page can be found at:

http://developers.sun.com/web/scripting/

Looks like its mostly aggregations of blogs.sun.com blogs with a few extra thrown in. Good to see we are recognizing the some of our efforts in the scripting arena.

JMaki Release Last Week

Some really cool Ajax/Web 2.0 technology developed by some folks at Sun was released last week, JMaki 1.0. This is a very cool Ajax framework for developing applications with versions for Java, PHP, and Ruby.

I almost got to help write a course on it, but the project got put on the back burner for the time being. Hopefully I will find some time to play around with it in my copious spare time. :)