Google announces Gadgets for Linux

Google recently announced the release of their Gadgets for the Linux desktop, and, unlike some of their other desktop offerings, they released it under a free software license. While it is not earth-shattering technology, Gadgets does provide some interesting features and amusing diversions. It also generates some hope that Google is getting better at understanding what free software users are looking for, so perhaps things like the Google Desktop for Linux will be better integrated and more useful in the future.

Gadgets are a cross-platform way to create simple applications that can run on web pages and desktops. The gadget API provides a means to retrieve content from other sites and display it along with a user interface. Many kinds of applications can be created, from clocks and calendars to RSS-feedreaders and "picture of the day" viewers.

There are numerous gadgets available, a semi-random collection on a KDE desktop can be seen at left. Google has created a handful of gadgets, but the vast majority are available from others in various categories including News, Sports, Finance, Fun and Games, Technology, and Communication. The gadget browser shown below, at right, allows easy access to an amazing number of choices, many of which are variations on a theme.

To get started with gadgets, it is first necessary to build the tool. Google does not yet provide .rpm or .deb files for various distributions. The "how to build" page was useful, but there was some difficulty in trying to translate the dependencies into Fedora 9 package names. A page in a language I don't know needed no translation, however. Linux commands, it seems, are multi-lingual.

Building from the Apache-licensed source tarball was straightforward after that. Gadgets for Linux comes in both GTK+ and Qt flavors which allows for integration with the two dominant Linux desktop environments. The screenshots accompanying this article are from the Qt version, but a bit of a look at the GTK+ version seemed roughly the same—though the Qt version lacks the sidebar dock.

This is a beta release, perhaps more of a beta than many Google releases, so there are still a fair number of glitches. Perhaps 20% of the gadgets tried had one problem or another, with some seeming not to function at all. Having no experience with gadgets on other platforms, it was not clear whether these were caused by bugs in the gadgets themselves or the desktop gadget program.

The main benefit of the gadget API seems to be the cross-platform capabilities. Gadgets can run—largely unchanged—on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows, but can also run in browsers on web pages at social networking sites or on other pages. If the API can deliver that wide of a range of platform choices, it could open up a much wider audience for folks that want to develop their gadgets on Linux.

Still missing is one of the tools recommended for developing gadgets, Gadget Designer, which is only available for Windows. The documentation for creating a gadget make it look like a tedious exercise in XML manipulation and Javascript programming, but there may be tools available or in development to make some of that easier.

Overall, gadgets look like an interesting project. There is really nothing new about the kinds of applications that can be built using the API, but there are few choices to build those kinds of programs in a truly cross-platform way. Google's choice to support Linux—and support it well—accompanied by the code under a free software license is, perhaps, the best news of all.