iGoogle launches canvas view

Posted by Dan Holevoet, Developer Programs

We're happy to announce the launch of the canvas view feature to iGoogle users in the U.S., rolling out over the course of the day. The canvas view feature allows gadget developers to build richer content, games, and UI for iGoogle's tens of millions of users by allowing them to build powerful full-page applications. In addition, canvas view provides developers with the opportunity to monetize their gadgets.


To get started, check out the documentation and examples on the iGoogle developer website. The site includes detailed information about iGoogle as well as information on upcoming OpenSocial functionality.

Try out the updated version of iGoogle and checkout some of the great canvas view gadgets developers have already built.

Spreadsheet gadgets: free dynamic data for your gadget

Posted by Justin Kosslyn, Google Spreadsheet Team

Want to develop new features for google spreadsheets? Want a dynamic, collaborative data store for gadgets embedded in your site? If you answered “yes” to either question, you’re in luck – spreadsheet gadgets can be embedded directly in spreadsheets or use spreadsheets as dynamic data stores.

For example, here’s a Motion Chart gadget that’s reading data from a spreadsheet. You or a collaborator can add more data to the gadget by modifying the underlying spreadsheet.



Or here's a much simpler example that just integrates Google maps with a simple spreadsheet:



You can extend any existing gadget into a spreadsheet gadget with the Google Visualization API. When your gadgets are ready for prime time, you can submit them to the Gallery and possibly get your gadgets featured on our Gadget picker within the Google Docs spreadsheets editor. So, whether you're just looking for a simple, dynamic database for your gadget, or want to integrate your other web products or services with Google Docs, check out this platform.

For more information, please check out our new developer documentation, Getting Started with Spreadsheet Gadgets.

We’ll also soon be expanding our APIs to allow your gadgets to write data back to an underlying Spreadsheet.

Give us feedback using our Feedback Form, where you can also let us know if you are interested in participating in early testing of the expanded read-write API.

iGoogle sandbox launch, includes support for canvas view and OpenSocial

Posted by Dan Holevoet, Developer Programs

Fellow gadget developers, I'm happy to announce the opening of the iGoogle developer sandbox, which supports both OpenSocial and the new gadgets.* JavaScript API.

For more information about the new sandbox, make sure to check out the getting started guide. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, join the discussion in the iGoogle Developer Forum.

Write a collaborative gadget with one line of code

Posted by Jeff Regan, Engineer

We've launched a new feature for iGoogle that allows people to use a gadget collaboratively, similar to Google Docs. Its now possible for multiple instances of a gadget - on the home pages of different users - to access the same user-preference data, the part of the gadget state that is hosted by iGoogle.

We've enabled this for an initial set of existing gadgets where it makes sense - see the post on the Google Blog.

If you think it makes sense for your gadget, just add this line to your the ModulePrefs section of your gadget:

<optional feature="shareable-prefs">

This line tells iGoogle to present a new sharing UI for the gadget, prompting the user to specify friends to share data with and whether the friends should have read-only or write access to the shared data. The UI also offers the user a means to see who they are sharing the gadget with and modify access rights.

Its a simple sharing model - last write wins, and a reload is required to see changes made by others. We look forward to seeing new collaborative gadgets that take advantage of this feature, and we can always make it better - with your feedback.

Join us at Google I/O

Posted by Dan Holevoet, Google Gadgets Team

I thought I'd let you all know about Google I/O, a developer event upcoming on the 28th and 29th of May at Moscone West in San Francisco. There are a lot of exciting opportunities at the event, including: breakout sessions, code labs, fireside chats, tech talks, and sessions that you, the developers, can hold yourselves.

The talks will cover a variety of topics, many of which focus on gadget-related technology. Be sure not to miss "Apache Shindig: Make Your Social Site an OpenSocial Container" and the related code lab. The two discussions will focus on deploying OpenSocial applications, but Shindig can be used to serve gadgets on your site, social or not.

For more information, check out the website: http://code.google.com/events/io.

New possibilities with Gadgets!

Posted by Nir Bar-Lev, Product Management

Visualizations have always been a great way to display data and get insights. The sales graph always needs to go up, right? I’ve yet to see a boardroom with a table of data instead of interesting graphs. And of-course it’s not just about businesses and boardrooms, we all like to visualize our information.

The problem is that many times it is hard to integrate the visual components with the data and application. It’s long and frustrating. Is this familiar?

Well, today we've launched the Google Visualization API, which has a gadget extension that lets gadget developers develop amazing visual gadgets over an open API to structured data sources, the first of which being Google Spreadsheets. We’ve also added a discussion group just for this type of Visual Gadgets and the API extensions.

We look forward to seeing great things from you using this new API.

Mission: Possible - Building a Google Gadget

Posted by Brian Shih, Google Gadgets Team

Once again, our very own Dann Lee stars in a great tutorial on building gadgets. In this video, you'll learn how to write a gadget step-by-step. We'll take one of our popular gadgets and show you how to build your own version from scratch. The gadget example uses various API features such as tabs, dynamic-height, and analytics. By the end of the video, you'll have a better understanding on how to create your own successful gadget in addition to learning key points about distribution. Have fun!

As always, if you've got further questions, please drop by the group.