OU Library iGoogle Gadgets

Just over a month ago, the OU web team released a “Fact of the Day” Google gadget that publishes an interesting fact from an OpenLearn course once a day, along with a link to the OpenLearn course that it came from.

(By the by, compare the offical press release with Laura’s post…)

The OU Library just announced a couple of OU Library iGoogle gadgets too (though I think they have been around for some time…)…

…but whereas the Fact of the Day widget is pretty neat, err, erm, err…

Here’s the new books widget. The Library produces an RSS feed of new books for a whole host of different topic areas. So you can pick your topic and view the new book titles in a gadget on your Google personal page, right…?

Err – well, you can pick a topic area from the gadget…

…and when you click “Go” you’re taken to the Library web page listing the new books for that topic area in a new tab…

Hmmm…

[Lots of stuff deleted about broken code that gives more or less blank pages when you click through on "Art History" at least; HTTP POST rather than GET (I don't want to have to header trace to debug their crappy code) etc etc]

I have to admit I’m a little confused as to who would want to work this way… All the gadget does is give you lots of bookmarks to other pages. It’s not regularly (not ever) bringing any content to me that I can consume within my Google personal page environment… (That said, it’s probably typical of the sort of widget I developed when I first started thinking about such things…and before lots of AJAX toolkits were around…)

This could be so, so much better… For a start, much simpler, and probably more relevant…

For example, given a feed URL, you can construct another URL that will add the feed to your iGoogle page.

Given a URL like this:
http://voyager.open.ac.uk/rss/compscience.xml
just do this:
http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://voyager.open.ac.uk/rss/compscience.xml
which takes you to a page like this:

where you can get a widget like this:

Personally, I’d do something about the feed title…

It’s not too hard to write a branded widget that will display the feed contents, or maybe a more elaborate one that will pull in book covers.

For example, here’s an old old old old example of an alternative display – a carousel (described here, in a post from two years ago: Displaying New Library Books):

Admittedly, you’re faced with the issue of how to make the URLs known to the user. But you could generate a URL from a form on th Library gadget page, and assign it to an “add to Google” image button easily enough.

And the other widget – the Library catalogue search…?

Let’s just say that in the same way as the ‘new books’ widget is really just a list of links hidden in a drop down box, so the catalogue search tool is actually just a redirecting search box. Run a query and you’re sent to the Voyager catalogue search results page, rather than having the results pulled back to you in the gadget on the Google personal page.

(I know, a lot of search widgets are like that (I’ve done more than a few myself in years gone by), but things have moved on and I think I’d really expect the results to be pulled back into the widget nowadays…)

PS okay, I’m being harsh, it’s been a long crappy day, I maybe shouldn’t post this… maybe the widgets will get loads of installs, and loads of traffic going to the Library site… I wonder if they’re checking the web stats to see, maybe because they found out how to add Google Analytics tracking to a Google gadget? And I wonder what success/failure metrics they’re using?

PPS okay, okay – I apologise for the above post, Library folks. The widgets are a good effort – keep up the good work. I’ll be interested to see how you iterate the design of these widgets over the next few weeks, and what new wonders you have in store for us all… :-) Have a think about how users might actually use these widgets, and have a look at whether it may be appropriate to pull content back into the widget using an AJAX call, rather than sending the user away from their personal page to a Library web page. If you can find any users, ask them what they think, and how they’re using the widget. Use web stats/analytics to confirm (or deny) what they’re saying (users lie… ;-). And keep trying stuff out… my machine is littered with dead code and my Google personal page covered in broken and unusable widgets that I’ve built myself. Evolution requires failure…and continual reinvention ;-)

The Obligatory Google Chrome Post – Sort Of…

Okay, so I’m a few days behind the rest of the web posting on this (though I tweeted it early;-), and I have to admit I still haven’t tried the Google Chrome browser out yet (it’s such a chore booting into Windows…), so here are some thoughts based on a reading of the the comic book and a viewing of the launch announcement.

Why Chrome? And how might it play out? (I’m not suggesting things were planned this way…) Here’s where you get to see how dazed and confused I am, and how very wrong I can be about stuff ;-)

First up – Chrome is for mobile devices, right? It may not have been designed for that purpose, but the tab view looks pretty odd to me, going against O/S UI style guides for pretty much everything. Each tab in its own process makes sense for mobile devices, where multiple parallel applications may be running at any time, but only one is in view. Rumbling’s around the web suggest Chrome for Android is on its way in a future Android release…

Secondly, Google Chrome draws heavily on Google Gears. Google Gears provides the browser with it’s own database, so the browser can store lots of state locally. (Does Gears also provide a lite, local webserver?) Google Gears lets you use web apps offline, and store lots of state without making a call on the host computer’s o/s…

So I’m guessing that Chrome would work well as a virtual appliance…? That is, it’s something that can be popped into a Jumpbox appliance, for example, and run…. anywhere…like from a live CD or bootable USB key (a “live USB”)? That is, run it as a “live virtual appliance”. So you don’t need a host operating system, just a boot manager? Or if all your apps are in the cloud, you just need a machine that runs Chrome (maybe with Flash and Silverlight plugins too).

Chrome lets you create standalone “desktop web apps” in the form of “single application browsers” – a preloaded tab that “runs” Gmail or Google docs, for example, (or equally, I guess, Zoho web applications), just as if they were any other desktop application. The browser becomes a container for applications. If you can run the browser, you can run the app. If you can run the browser in a virtual appliance (or on a mobile device – UI issues aside), you can run the app…

Chrome makes use of open source components – the layout engine, Javascript engine, Gears and so on. Open source presumably makes anti-trust claims harder to put together if the browser starts to take market share; if other browser developers use the code, it legitimises it, as well as increasing the developer community.

On the usability side, the major thing that jumped out at me was that there’s a single search’n'address “omnibox” within each tab. Compare that to current browsers, where the address bar and search box are separate and above the line of selectable tabs.

It’s worth noting here that many people don’t really understand the address bar and the browser search box – they just get to Google any way they can and type stuff into the Google search box: keywords, URLs, brandnames, cut’n'pasted natural language text, anything and everything…

What the omnibox appears to do is to provide a blend of Google Suggest, browser history suggest/URL autocompletion, (and maybe ultimately Google personal browsing history?) and automagically acquired site specific opensearch helpers within a single user entry text box. (I love psychic/ESP searchboxes… I even experimented with using one on searchfeedr, I think?) I guess it also makes migration of the browser easier to a mobile device – each tab satisfies most of the common UI requirements of a single window browser?

A couple of other things that struck me while pondering the above:
– what’s with the URL for the comicbook? http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ What else can we expect to appear on http://www.google.com/googlebooks/?
- has Google taken an interest in any of the virtual appliance players – Parallels, VMware, Jumpbox etc etc?