Go Global Gadget ^™

This is an adaptation of our Apple Dashboard Bedrock Biorhythm gadget. It was done in flash and renders your biorhythm. What’s great about this gadget is it’s interactivity. Click on the graph and move your mouse! You’ll see that you can zoom in and out and move across time with the click of a button.

The Apple Dashboard widget can be found here:

Download Bedrock Biorhythms for Mac

One of our more popular gadgets is the New Music Releases Gadget:

It has tabs so you may select between the various genres.

Last night we through together a very quick and dirty website for splitting Animated GIFs. It was particular because there was no fully functional code to split a GIF available on the web. We started with a very basic script found here that decodes Animated GIFS in its most basic form. Then we used GD to read the GIFs and apply each subsequent animation frame to the last. The images are displayed and and a zip file is created for downloading all the frames of animation.

We created this because we couldn’t find any online tools for splitting an animated GIF. You’ll see one of our clients World Label has an animated GIF as their header graphic. This needed to be split into each frame so transparency could be added before we could use it in their Dashboard Widget called iLabel-it CD. That widget is not yet released. But instead of just making the Animated GIF splitter we created a website for all to use.

Our new website can be found here:

We here at GGG wanted to create our own Wikipedia gadget. We didn’t want to follow the herd and just re-create what already existed. We used our capabilities to create a dynamic Social Wikipedia Search. This is a fun change that uses the power of community to educate: not just on Wikipedia but within a gadget. You get to see what other people are searching for. It only shows the latest few searches and there is an option to opt out of sending your search to everyone else. If you opt out then your searches will go directly to Wikipedia. You basically get to see what other people are searching for. In this process you may find an entry you’d like to read.

Here it is in action:

Last fall NetLingo and GGG collaborated to create a gadget called NetLingo Word of the Day. It’s a great useful gadget that shows various words and phrases used around the ‘net. There are thousands of entries and we are fortnutate to be working with such a person as Erin on such a website as NetLingo. Our part of this was to actually make the gadget. The easy part

It can be viewed here:

Our XMLIndent.com website has a new coloring and formatting algorithm. It’s custom and now colors comments correctly.
Also, a download button was added to the mix to allow the formatted text to be downloaded from the website.

There have been some minor edits made to GC. The messages in peoples’ profile has been updated to include avatars (both the person’s messages and their favorites). Also, the dynamic reloading of messages each minute has been updated so there hopefully won’t be any problems with Safari any more. It has to do with how it was updating the new message vs all the messages. The compatible way here is to use TActivePanel and update it’s innards on each refresh. We decided to do our own callback because it needed to be run specifically at the 12th second and the 42 second (plus a little randomization so the server isn’t slammed with requests at the same time).

This version is called beta 5.1.

The next version will be forcing people to accept a new terms of service agreement. This is because there was none for a long time and it’s about time to change that.

We’ve recently completely revamped our GoogleWidgets.net website using PRADO. It works wonderfully. It’s now super easy to submit your gadgets via the Submit a Gadget button. The website gets quite a bit of traffic so it’s worthwhile to submit your gadget to the site.

About a month ago, Marth 18th, there was a mistake made in the iGoogle Gadget server software. All of the grandfathered inline gadgets users received the security message again. They have already clicked OK but for many it was confusing and deleted the gadget instead of clicking OK again. People thought it was a virus or malware, or something because the sum of people clicking delete was upwards of 65% of all inline gadget users!!! That’s an enormous number of people. This comes on the heels of Google deprecating the inline gadget modules a few months ago. That was a decision we here at GGG disagree with completely given our orientation towards animal gadgets in the page (Ladybugs, Butterflies, and Real Fish).

Not only did they deprecate inline modules they made them very nearly irrelevant to author standings and searches. This was a real stinker because our highest rated gadget developer dropped from 3rd place to 28th place. But also important was that we thought our Universal Search Tabs were really useful and should have a chance to stand up against the other multi-search gadgets. Due to Google’s negative bias towards inline gadgets we ended up promoting that gadget through our existing gadget base.

Google, if you’re listening, these have been a bad series of decisions. Inline gadgets are one of the few things that made your platform unique among the many gadget platforms. Some day you’ll remove the grandfathered gadgets from operation and that will be a terrible day for the hundreds of thousands of users that love our Gadget Animals.

Our DVD Releases gadgets are extremely popular. It’s about displaying the dvd releases for the week with the ability to search and scan forwards and backwards as many weeks as you’d like. The iGoogle gadget is here:

Our Apple Dashboard DVD Releases Widget can be downloaded as well. It was ported over to the Opera web browser as a widget which can be downloaded here. It looks something like this:

It can also be found on NetVibes. It looks like this:

Lastly, we have a Vista DVD Releases Gadget which can be downloaded here

About a two months ago we upgraded our server to a beast of a machine: the Apple Xserve. It will do very nicely given the growth of the various websites, gadgets, and projects we have running. Our data is now not just backed-up but on a RAID 5 system designed to keep running even in the unlikely event of a hard drive crashing. Many other companies have been hit due to such over-sights, like Library Thing (they have since started using such redundant systems).

We here wanted to be proactive and upgrade our systems before anything nasty happened. We also needed a better machine to support the growth of usage of our gadgets. Lastly, we were waiting on a better server to make changes to GC in the event that the website would trail blaze and bring our existing server to a halt.

Things are running much smoother now. Sweet.

Progress has been made in completely revamping the GC website. The direction of the site is becoming more focused. The changes are meant to be evolutionary and not revolutionary. The existing user base is very strong and the risk of alienating them it too high given a complete remake. The first change was to completely remove and update the backend database and the middleware application layer. We decided to use PRADO, a PHP 5 Application framework. It’s unique in the world of PHP in that it’s event based. It’s closer to ASP.NET than, say, J2EE or Ruby on Rails. PHP is also a very robust language with a long history and many many extensions that enhance functionality (such as eaccelerator which provides a near 10x speed increase).

The changes to the site have been the inclusion of avatars and Gravatars, AJAX updating of the latest messages, and the newest messages are now on the front page of the site. The forum uses BBPress and the site is built on the combination of PRADO and Wordpress. The personal messages section of the site was also completely revamped and includes an auto complete text field for entering user names.
Threads and replying was also added to the site recently. Favorites are another loved feature of the site. Lastly, the geo-location part of the site was made to use Yahoo Maps so now you can enter your address and get back your geolocation.

We just finished up a new simple gadget for Brave New Workshop. They produced a book that’s for sale at Amazon called “Return to Civility: A Speed of Laughter Project.” What’s really cool about this project is that it’s a non-profit. It’s about helping us be more civil on a day to day basis. Here’s the sample:

We decided the other day to make a full website out of a tool that we developed that colorizes and indents xml. It makes xml easy to read and understand. Very cool.

      XML Indent

If your a programmer this site can really come in handy. It’ll format any XML document from RSS to Amazon Web Service results.

Welcome to the launch of Go Global Gadget, LLC. This is our blog that will keep you updated on our work. We formed our company in November 2007 and we’ve had a very strong start. To update you on our work we’ve worked with Netflix, Sharper Image, and eLuxury on some premium Google Gadget Ads. Our founder and technical lead is even listed as one of the few Google Gadget Ad Developers.

For Netflix, they wanted to promote the their Netflix Now Playing featuring Dana Carvey campaign. We started with a featurette that was to be played when the ad was clicked. This ad has even been further customized for a second run.

Sharper Image wanted to promote their products (like their digital picture frames) within a Google Gadget Ad. To meet their needs we developed an interactive ad with two modes. One mode pulls products from the Sharper Image Google Base RSS feed. That can be further customized with a search term. The second mode was for custom defining the products to display. This is an example of the ad using custom defined products. It was originally run for Christmas 2007 season.

eLuxury wanted something similar to the Sharper Image Gadget Ad but with their own take on the look and feel of the Gadget Ad. It too was run for the Christmas 2007 season.