Marathi Newspaper “सकाळ” Reports on Google Desktop
“सकाळ”, ("The Morning"), a popular newspaper in my native tongue, ran a piece on Google Desktop. I’m not a regular reader, but my attention was drawn to it by several friends and family, who noticed my name mentioned in it. Now, while I’m not really sure how they got the info, or even where they got it from, it seems to have originated here in California on Google’s Press Day. Well, Andy Warhol was right!
Google Desktop now includes Google Calendar Gadget
A new version of Google Desktop released today. (For those who came in late, I worked on Google Desktop last year, and have been writing plugins for it for some time now.) When Google Calendar released, I wrote a plugin for it too.
Since my plugin was licensed under an open-source license, Google added features to it and included it in the official download. What's more, I even get credited in the source code. Go, Google! -- kudos to the nice people in the Desktop/Calendar teams.
The Thin Line Between Fact and Fiction
The upcoming release of the movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code had me thinking a little bit about the whole interleaving-facts-and-fiction thing. OK, here I go: remember this is going to be a little weird.
In the book, Dan Brown mixes fact with fiction so deftly. But why should it be restricted to a book? (And I'm not talking about the make-a-movie-out-of-it sense.) As in, we get information from so many sources: books, newspapers, television, the Web, friends, gossip, etc. How about designing, not a book, but an experience: so everything you see or hear about a particular topic is a mixture of fact and fiction. And somewhere within there, is the author's skill to embed his own story into history. It's no longer something you pick up and read, it's something you experience all the time. Part of the story might unravel itself in newspaper sections (think advertisements, or guest columns), part of the story could be revealed in a television episode, and some happenings are covered in a magazine. It's the same storyline, same timeline, it's just not restricted to a single medium. And it's no longer separate from fact: as events happen in the real world, the author (or rather, the designer) will incorporate them into the developing story.
Perhaps it could also be a community-designed experience: if you want to influence the story in a certain way (even a very minor way), you could do that. Like one of those detective books, "turn to page 46 if you think X is the killer." One could even do some backward time-travel weirdness by sneaking around and editing web log entries, or publishing two alternative versions simultaneously in a magazine and a newspaper and throwing people off on a wild goose chase to figure out what happened.
The next generation in entertainment? Or just a crazy blog entry? You be the judge! :-)
Impeccable Timing
Last week, I wrote a plug-in for viewing Del.icio.us bookmarks in the Google Desktop Sidebar. Then I submitted it to Google, and it was being tested by them for a couple days. Then they approved it, and added it to the listing on their website as well as in a blog entry. I had already been receiving feedback from the curious beta testers on the Google Desktop Developers group.
So far, so good.
Then, exactly on the day Google pushed an update to their servers (which contained the new pages for my plugin), Del.icio.us announced that they were being bought by Yahoo! Not that it made a huge lot of difference; del.icio.us is still the same, and as useful as it always was.
But it's a little ironic that I ended up writing a product that put a Yahoo! property inside the Google Sidebar. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- but you know, they're like rivals and stuff. :-)
Coverage Elsewhere:
- Googlist: Google Desktop adds del.icio.us plug-in
- SearchEngineWatch: Del.icio.us (or is it Yahoo.licio.us?) Bookmarks Come to the Google Sidebar [...].
- Fresh Blog: Show Del.icio.us bookmarks in Google Desktop
- DownloadBlog.it: Del.icio.us Plugin per Google Desktop (Italian)
- Steffen Rusitschka predicts that Google will want this removed soon. Let's hope not!
- Dolphin 278's Blog
- Svartling
And all this happened on exactly the same day. Like I said, the timing was impeccable!
Movies Plugin for Google Desktop
With the latest release, Google Desktop 2.0 introduced script plugins. That means that it's now easy as ever to create sidebar panels. So I went ahead and created a Movies plugin -- you specify a zip code, and it will display customized movie listings for theaters near your home. You can also filter by genre, MPAA ratings, or user ratings, and sort by popularity or ratings.
Worth a try! It's available free: Google Desktop Movies Plugin.
It has also featured in Google's Plugin Library, and on the Google Desktop Blog as Plugin of the Week.
Not bad for half a day's work, eh? That's putting the Thanksgiving break to fruitful use. :-)
