Have you ever wondered what celebrities do when they use the web? Today, we're announcing the new iGoogle Showcase, which allows you to see and share the homepages of some of your favorite icons. These 30 preeminent people, including Dave Matthews, Rachael Ray and Katie Couric, are sharing their iGoogle pages with you in full so you can get a glimpse into their interests and how they experience the web.
The iGoogle Showcase allows you to either add a celebrity's entire iGoogle page to your own, or browse through the collection and choose different gadgets and themes from several pages. For example, you might select Al Gore's iGoogle page for his preferred theme and gadgets for keeping up on the latest media news, supporting the Alliance for Climate protection cause or browsing through photos from National Geographic.
In addition, many of our celebrity partners have created their own custom iGoogle gadgets to easily connect with their fans every day. If you're a Ryan Seacrest fan, his new gadget can help you keep up with all the latest entertainment news. You can follow his tweets, watch exclusive videos, listen to radio interviews, and view his photo albums. Donald Trump offers advice to entrepreneurs, Martha Stewart shares recipes and tips, and Anderson Cooper delivers headline news and extras from his CNN show AC360.
To get any one of our celebrity themes or gadgets on your own iGoogle page, visit the iGoogle Showcase. We've all heard about "six degrees of separation," but now, some of your favorite stars are just a few clicks away.
Showing posts with label gadgets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gadgets. Show all posts
Give your gadgets some space
This week we launched a set of new features to all iGoogle users in the U.S. These features were designed to make it more powerful and bring more information to the homepage.
At the heart of this release is a feature we call "canvas view," which gives you the option to maximize your gadgets into full-screen mode. To use the Gmail gadget as an example, previously, you could only get a quick snippet of your Gmail messages on iGoogle. Now you can maximize Gmail to fully read and reply to your messages.
Comics. Games. Feeds. Photos. All of these get better when you give them some space. And to give you fast, one-click access to maximize your gadgets, we've introduced a new left-navigation model. This is a good way to navigate to these new, richer applications, and it makes space for more features you'll see in the coming months.
We invite you to take a tour of all the new features, and hope you'll give us a chance to show you why we're excited about the evolution of iGoogle.
At the heart of this release is a feature we call "canvas view," which gives you the option to maximize your gadgets into full-screen mode. To use the Gmail gadget as an example, previously, you could only get a quick snippet of your Gmail messages on iGoogle. Now you can maximize Gmail to fully read and reply to your messages.
Comics. Games. Feeds. Photos. All of these get better when you give them some space. And to give you fast, one-click access to maximize your gadgets, we've introduced a new left-navigation model. This is a good way to navigate to these new, richer applications, and it makes space for more features you'll see in the coming months.
We invite you to take a tour of all the new features, and hope you'll give us a chance to show you why we're excited about the evolution of iGoogle.
Now, read us in gadget form
Our corporate blog network is more than four years old now. We offer blogs about Google products and initiatives, local blogs (for 11 countries), blogs for advertisers and publishers, and a stable of blogs for developers. We hope you find the contents to be informative, timely, and, on occasion, fun.
To help you keep track of our news and updates more easily, we've created a new Blog Directory (which links from the main page on this blog) and an iGoogle gadget so you can stay current right from your dashboard. If you'd prefer to read recent posts by category, install our iGoogle blog tab (the customizable tab will load upon clicking), which will always show you the most recent blog updates by categories such as 'Open Source,' 'Mobile' or 'Publishers.' There are 16 categories, so you can pick and choose which ones to keep on your page after adding.
Software engineer Derek Collison built the gadget using the AJAX APIs. The current version is in beta; we plan to use the Language API to roll out translations for the blogs in 13 languages other than English and add new interface and navigation options. Developer Ben Lisbakken built the tab, and webmaster extraordinaire Champika Fernando built the directory with help from graphic designer Ryan Germick. A heartfelt thanks for all of their contributions in making our blog family more 'universally accessible and useful.'
To help you keep track of our news and updates more easily, we've created a new Blog Directory (which links from the main page on this blog) and an iGoogle gadget so you can stay current right from your dashboard. If you'd prefer to read recent posts by category, install our iGoogle blog tab (the customizable tab will load upon clicking), which will always show you the most recent blog updates by categories such as 'Open Source,' 'Mobile' or 'Publishers.' There are 16 categories, so you can pick and choose which ones to keep on your page after adding.
Software engineer Derek Collison built the gadget using the AJAX APIs. The current version is in beta; we plan to use the Language API to roll out translations for the blogs in 13 languages other than English and add new interface and navigation options. Developer Ben Lisbakken built the tab, and webmaster extraordinaire Champika Fernando built the directory with help from graphic designer Ryan Germick. A heartfelt thanks for all of their contributions in making our blog family more 'universally accessible and useful.'
The Spelman College CS Olympiad
We're always interested in supporting computer science education, and in encouraging top talent from diverse backgrounds. Which is why we've just sponsored the Sixth Annual Spelman College Computer Science Olympiad for the second consecutive year. In all, 16 teams from eight Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs), or Association of Computer/Information Sciences and Engineering Departments at Minority Institutions (ADMI) participated.
These teams competed in five computer science-related events. One of these was a Google Gadgets competition, where the assignment was to build an interactive, creative and useful Google Gadget. Students brought their semi-completed gadgets and got troubleshooting advice and tips at a hack session, where Googlers and students worked together into the night to perfect them. The following day, each team presented their gadget to our panel of three judges (myself and 2 other Googlers).
We chose first, second and third place winners, whose gadgets will be uploaded to the iGoogle Directory soon:
- First place: Morehouse College Team 2 (Lawrence Forrester, Kevin Walton, Mark Slade, Michael Davis)
- Second place: Old Dominion University Monarchs (Duc Nguyen, Cesar Barbieri, Darrin Lee, Nicole Jackson)
- Third place: Spelman College YOMamaBoards (Jonecia Keels, Jazmine Miller, Paige McReynolds, Arielle Baine)
First-place winner.
Opening Google Docs to users and developers via Gadgets and Visualization API
Whenever we're asked "how do people use Google spreadsheets?", we always struggle with where to start. It's not that we can't think of examples, it's just that the examples are all so different, so unique. Sure, there are definitely favorite themes -- sports, finance and, yes, knitting -- but then the examples become so particular to the people and groups who are using them: The beer taster's results. The nursery school class schedule. The biker's riding log. The family reunion plan. The ski-trip sign-up form. Endless examples, all of which, to spreadsheet junkies like us, are interesting.
But while we've always wanted to give people more options to view and use their information in Google Docs, we knew that trying to build all of these one at a time would simply serve too few people, given all the different ways people use and share spreadsheets.
So today we're starting a new path to better enable developers to customize and build on top of Google Docs with two new tools we are releasing today: Gadgets-in-Docs and the Visualization API.
Instead of delivering just one or two new types of reports, or a new visual map mashup (can you ever get enough of those?), we decided to deliver a platform on which anyone, not just Google, could build the next best thing. We even invited a few developers to try this with us, and they join us in this launch by featuring just a few of their creations, like Panorama's pivot table, or Viewpath's Gantt Chart, or InfoSoft's Funnel Charts -- all great tools for the student and enterprise user alike. We also built a few early gadgets ourselves which you might find useful.
We borrowed the Gadgets-in-Docs concept from the iGoogle team, so it's only fitting that you can also publish your spreadsheet gadgets to iGoogle, where you can see your data-based-Gadget right next to all that other stuff that's important to you (even if it is just a picture of your dog).
To try it out, go into Google Docs and open up a spreadsheet. Click on the chart icon, and click 'Gadget...'. Pick your gadget, customize it to fit your data, and then publish it out to iGoogle or to any webpage.
If you're a developer and want to reach millions of people with your latest creation, check out the Google Visualization API, courtesy of our visualization team engineers. The Visualization API provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community. It provides a common way (an API) to access structured data sources, the first being Google spreadsheets.
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