New tutorial: Using Gadget Designer

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 at 2:51 PM

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer (Google Desktop Team)

Back in October, James Yum blogged about changes to Gadget Designer, a Windows application that helps you create Desktop gadgets. Since then, Gadget Designer has continued to improve, with bug fixes and support for the latest API changes.

Now there's a new tutorial that leads you through the major features of the latest version of Gadget Designer, from creating and editing your gadget to debugging it and generating the gadget package. Here it is:

Using Gadget Designer

Even if you've used Gadget Designer before, please check it out. Who knows? You might learn something new, and we always appreciate your feedback.

Docs are moving

Tuesday, February 19, 2008 at 10:04 AM

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer (Google Desktop Team)

The Google Desktop developer documentation is moving from desktop.google.com to code.google.com. Here's the new URL:

   http://code.google.com/apis/desktop

How does this move help you? Well, thanks to the infrastructure provided by code.google.com, you'll see features such as:

• A new home page that includes snippets from the latest blog entries and developer group posts
  
• A new index that lists every page
• Side navigation that's collapsible and includes every page

Although this move was mostly a matter of reformatting the docs, we also made a few improvements to the contents. Most notably, we clarified which APIs a Desktop gadget can use, and we added links to relevant examples and articles.

If you have feedback on the docs, please send it to gd-developer AT google DOT com.

Gadgets on the Mac

Thursday, November 29, 2007 at 9:12 AM

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer (Google Desktop Team)

With the release of the Google Gadgets for the Mac feature of Google Desktop, Mac users can now run Desktop gadgets! As Mike Pinkerton's post on the Google Code blog explains, your gadget should run just fine on the Mac unless it relies on Windows-specific APIs. A new page, Writing a Cross-Platform Gadget, has details on what you can do to make sure your gadget works everywhere.

RSS gadget and tutorial

Friday, September 07, 2007 at 8:26 AM

Posted by James Yum, Support Engineer (Google Desktop Team)

We've released a new SDK that introduces the RSS template gadget. By modifying this sample gadget, you can create an RSS feed reader gadget within minutes. Being the programmers we are, we couldn't help but add some geeky features:

• Skinnable - The visual elements are in a single folder (default). You can easily skin the gadget by replacing images or modifying a few XML files.
  
• Customizable feed parser - The gadget can parse most RSS and Atom feeds out of the box. However, you can write custom parsing code if needed.
• Production ready - The gadget properly handles the little details that tend to be overlooked. It's resizable and scrollable, and it works offline.

Kathy also wrote a great tutorial that shows you how to modify the template to make your own gadget.

We made this sample gadget to save you time and frustration. I'm sure you've had ideas for your own RSS gadget so please try modifying the sample gadget to show your favorite feed, and submit your gadget.

We're very interested in your ideas and feedback. Our goal for the RSS template gadget is that it should be easy enough for new developers to use and flexible enough to cover most needs. Let us know what you think on the forum.