The most wonderful time of the year

Friday, December 28, 2007 at 12:45 AM

By Scott Knaster, Mac Team

2007 has been an amazing year for Apple users, beginning with the iPhone announcement and culminating in the highly anticipated release of Mac OS X Leopard in October. The Google Mac team has been busy too, starting with the MacFUSE release and finishing strong with the launch of Google Gadgets, an updated Google Desktop, and our Developer Playground.

But for Mac fans, the holidays don't end on New Year's Day. We all look forward to Macworld Expo in January, when Apple pulls back the curtain on its latest cool stuff. And for the first time, we'll have an official Google booth at Macworld. If you're at the show, we hope you'll drop by and say hi. Until then, enjoy your holiday season, and we'll see you in January.

Mac OS X Dashboard widget security issue

Thursday, December 20, 2007 at 12:59 PM

By Scott Knaster, Mac Team

If you've used our Gmail, Blogger, or Search History widgets recently, you might have noticed they're displaying a message asking you to download new versions. Here's why: Thomas Roessler of the W3C let us know about a security vulnerability in these widgets, and we've updated the widgets to fix the issues. To make sure you're covered, please download the new versions of your widgets:

To download the new Gmail and Blogger widgets, go to http://www.google.com/macwidgets.

To download the Search History widget, click here: download Search History widget.

Thanks, and sorry for the interruption.

Statz 0.8.5

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 at 11:23 AM

By Dave MacLachlan, Mac Team

It's barely been a week since we launched Statz on the Google Mac Developer Playground, and it's already seen a couple of major updates. The new version now supports Ircle, Snak, Conversation, Twitter and Tumblr on top of the already-supported Adium, Colloquy, iChat and Skype. It also has a new AppleScript plugin API so you can add your own custom plugins for Statz. There's an example AppleScript plugin that shows you how you can SMS your status to anybody in North America. Finally, there have been a pile of bug fixes and optimizations. If you were having troubles launching earlier versions of Statz, hopefully all the major issues should be solved now.

And now, we're looking for translators. We've made headway on French, German, Dutch, Spanish and (believe it or not) Swahili, but we'd love to get more help. Please come join the statz-discuss mailing list and give us a hand. Also, if you've got a favorite service you would like us to support, let us know and we'll see what we can come up with. Of course code and patches are always happily accepted :).

Google.com gets better on your iPhone

Wednesday, December 05, 2007 at 3:51 PM

By Scott Knaster, Mac Team

If you have an iPhone, be sure to visit google.com today. We've launched a new iPhone application that gives you single-screen access to a bunch of Google services, including search, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, and more. Check it out!

Welcome to the Playground!

Tuesday, December 04, 2007 at 11:06 AM

by Amit Singh, Engineering Manager, and Karen Grünberg, Product Manager

You won't be surprised to learn that we like to mix a healthy dose of fun into work. Our Mac team engineers spend their 20% time developing interesting experiments, useful tools, and just-for-fun software.

We've always had a place to showcase our consumer products. Today, we're unveiling the Google Mac Developer Playground, a website where the Mac community can look for new and interesting open source projects and demos from our Mac team. You'll find a variety of projects that we work on in our 20% time, like CoverStory, as well as our more mature open source projects such as MacFUSE and the GData libraries.

One new demo we want to highlight today is Statz. Dave MacLachlan, one of the engineers working on Google Desktop Mac, created it in his "spare" time. Statz lets you coordinate your status messages across various IM clients. If you have more than one IM client, we think this will come in handy.

We hope you'll find the Playground enjoyable and useful. Make sure to keep an eye out for more projects and demos at http://code.google.com/mac/.

Google Gadgets for the Mac

Tuesday, November 27, 2007 at 5:10 PM

By Mike Pinkerton, Software Engineer

Earlier this year, I posted here to introduce Google Desktop for Mac OS X. Today, on behalf of my team, I'm happy to unveil the latest feature of Desktop: Google Gadgets for Mac OS X Beta.

This feature brings hundreds of existing Google Gadgets to Dashboard. You can add fun gadgets (such as bowling, virtual flower pot, or YouTube), useful gadgets (weather maps, driving directions, and news), and others that offer daily wisdom for the ages (Confucius, horoscopes, and even a joke of the day!). These gadgets look and behave just like any other Dashboard widget, so you don't have to learn anything new.

With hundreds of gadgets available and more being added every week, you might wonder how to get started. No problem! The Google Gadgets application is your one-stop shop for all available gadgets, complete with search to quickly find what you're looking for. If you're concerned you might miss out on new gadgets as they come along, don't be. The Google Gadgets application regularly updates itself so the list of available gadgets is never out of date.

You can download the new software at http://desktop.google.com/mac/.

The best part is that anyone can create a gadget. If you are interested in developing your own Google Gadget, check out the Desktop Gadget API homepage. There you'll see how to create a cross-platform gadget that runs on both Mac OS X and Windows. If you're already a gadget developer, download the Beta today to test your gadget on a Mac and ensure that it works correctly.

We need your help and your feedback to make this Beta an even better product. Please come visit our forum and let us know how we can do that.

DTrace demystified

Monday, November 05, 2007 at 1:43 PM

by Scott Knaster, Mac Team

Now that Leopard is sweeping the planet, you might have heard about its cool new developer technologies, including DTrace, a great tool for observing and debugging software as it's running. If you're interested in learning more about DTrace, check out this terrific MacTech article written by our own Greg Miller.