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Version: 0.10.3
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Google Desktop is a very useful application, allowing you to quickly find files on your computer (or in your email inbox or on the internet, for that matter), and including a sidebar where you can put little gadgets and things. And it’s cross-platform, meaning pretty much anybody can use it. The Linux version, however, has two shortcomings: it’s closed-source, and it doesn’t contain the sidebar-and-gadgets stuff.

But today’s program solves for both of those!

Google Gadgets for Linux allows you to place desktop gadgets on your . . . desktop, naturally, or arrange them nicely in a sidebar on the side of the screen. In fact, it looks and behaves nearly exactly like the Microsoft Windows version of Google Desktop, but without the search functionality (so for a complete Google experience, you’ll have to download the version of the Desktop for Linux, separately).

There’s a a number of dependencies that you’ll have to fulfill before you can compile. Yes, that’s right — even though Google Desktop is closed-source on all platforms (mostly to protect Google’s search algorithm), the Gadgets-only project for Linux is completely open, and functions just like any other open-source project.  Which includes compiling from source.  Happily, the dependencies are all listed on the website, with package names for a number of popular distributions. Or, even better, you can save yourself the time and hassle, and find Google Gadgets prepackaged for your distro and ready for installation, in a number of different places on the internets. I came across deb and rpm packages here and here, respectively. And one interesting thing you might want to keep in mind is that Gadgets can use either the Qt or GTK+ libraries for its interface, so you can choose whichever better fits your desktop environment.

Once you’ve got it all working, you can start Google Gadgets from your application menu (found under both Accessories and Internet), or by running ggl-gtk or ggl-qt, as appropriate, from a shell.

The first thing you’ll see is the sidebar, at the right of the screen — in a large and solid shade of grey, quite likely. If such is the case, I highly recommend using a compositing window manager, such as Compiz. Using compositing will enable transparency, which is much of what makes Gadgets so appealing. The sidebar will be partially transparent, and those gadgets you drag off the sidebar and onto the desktop proper will have smoothly contoured edges, rather than sporting grey rectangular backgrounds themselves.

By default the sidebar contains only one gadget: a digital clock.  This is a good representation of what gadgets are like in general — simple, usually having a single purpose, and generally interactive to a certain extent (click on the little round button on the right side of the clock to change its background color).  Clicking on the gadget and dragging it about allows you to rearrange its position on the sidebar, if of course you have multiple gadgets running, or to place it somewhere off your sidebar and out on the desktop, in whatever part of the screen befits it most.

If you hold your cursor over the gadget, three buttons will appear above it.  The first toggles expanded view.  This duplicates the gadget in a little window to the left of the sidebar, which remains until you close it.  This feature doesn’t usually have much practical use; but, because it shows gadgets at their default size, it can be of assistance with the more complicated gadgets (such as the calculator) which must be shrunk down to fit on the sidebar.  To the right of the expansion button is the menu button, which, quite naturally, displays a menu.  The various options in this menu allow you to collapse a gadget to make more room on your sidebar, undock it from the sidebar and place it in the middle of the screen, change options for those gadgets that have them, read the gadget’s About info, and remove it entirely.  The last of the three buttons also performs this same function, banishing the superfluous gadget from your screen and returning it to the depths of the internet, from whence it came.

As nice as this little digital clock is, though, you’ll probably not be content with it.  The program is called Google Gadgets — plural — which implies you’ll use more than one.  What you need are more! To add other gadgets, click the little plus icon at the top of the sidebar. This will bring up the Gadget Browser. The Browser is a window containing a sort of catalog of all the different gadgets you can add. Hold your mouse over one of them, and the space at the bottom of the window will show a short description of it, as well as its version number, file size, creation date, and the name of the creator. There’s quite a selection, though (60 pages of gadgets, as of now), which can make deciding what to use rather hard. But, luckily, you can choose to show only gadgets in your native language, as well as search for gadgets that match the keywords you type in. On the left are listed different categories of gadgets, so if you’ve got a sort of general idea about what it is you want to add, but don’t know specifically, you can narrow down the selection to make the hunt easier. Anyone can make their own gadgets, so not all of them are quite of the highest quality. However you can also choose to show only those gadgets made by the folks at Google themselves, which are all very professional.

Alongside the little ‘plus’ you’ll find two more buttons: the one minimizes the sidebar (and hides any gadgets out on your desktop), and the other brings up a menu for configuring the entire Google Gadgets program.  The functions of these two buttons are also duplicated in the icon in your system tray. Left-clicking on the icon will toggle the visibility of the sidebar and gadgets, and right-clicking will bring up the same menu that the button at the top of the sidebar does.

The behavior of Google Gadgets can be changed to meet your needs, by means of this menu; allowing you to automatically hide the sidebar (but not the off-sidebar gadgets) when a window is focused, keep the sidebar always visible by preventing any window from covering it up, position the sidebar on the left of the screen rather than the right, and change the font size used by your gadgets. A hotkey or keyboard combination can also be defined from this menu, to toggle the visibility of your gadgets without having to touch your mouse — I use Ctrl-Shift-G.

Google Gadgets for Linux has come a long way in the past few months. When I first downloaded it this summer, at version number 0.10.0, Gadgets used 100% CPU power, and nearly half the gadgets wouldn’t work. Now it works nearly flawlessly, and, while some Flash-based gadgets display as white boxes and RSS feed gadgets don’t show content in their popup boxes in my self-compiled installation, even most of those perform just fine in the prepackaged .deb version I downloaded (I’m thinking it’s a system-specific thing). And it can only get better from here!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Desktop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.