Saying Goodbye to iGoogle

Friday, November 1, 2013 at 12:35 AM

As we announced on the Official Google Blog nearly a year and a half ago, today we’re retiring iGoogle. Moving forward, iGoogle will redirect to www.google.com. If you’ve been using iGoogle gadgets to access information from Google products like Gmail and Finance, you can continue to do so via our new app launcher.

We know that many of you enjoyed your customized iGoogle experience, so if you’re looking for alternatives, there are some options that might fit your needs.

Sincerely,

The iGoogle Team

________________________

Frequently-asked questions

1. What will happen to my iGoogle data?

All iGoogle data will be systematically deleted from Google servers.

2. Will there be any way to retrieve my data from Google in the future?

No. All user data will be permanently, and irrevocably deleted.

3. Will this affect my other Google services?

No. It simply means you will access them in a different way. You will still be able to use Google Chrome as your web browser, and you will still be able to access all Google services, such as Gmail, Google Search, Google Bookmarks, Google Calendar, Google Finance, Google Translate, etc., by opening them directly.

4. Why was iGoogle discontinued?

Please refer to our blog post for more information.

5. What will happen with third party gadgets?

Gadgets provided by third party developers will continue to be served. Google Sites, and other third party sites that have installed these gadgets will not be affected.

An update on iGoogle

Tuesday, July 3, 2012 at 12:44 PM

As we announced on the Official Google Blog, on November 1, 2013, we will be retiring iGoogle.  To ensure a smooth transition for your users, you may want to update your gadgets and direct users to your site or offer the ability to export user data.  You may also consider launching your application on one of our other platforms.

As part of this sunset, we will no longer accept new theme submissions after July 31, 2012. Similarly, we will stop accepting new gadgets after July 31, 2012 - but you will be able to update and maintain existing gadgets, as before.

Feel free to reach out to us at the iGoogle Developer Forum if you have any questions or need assistance, and thank you for supporting iGoogle over the years.

Posted by Conrad Lo, Product Manager

More new features for the Gadget Dashboard

Friday, May 27, 2011 at 5:48 PM

Did you know we are continuously adding new features to the iGoogle Gadget Dashboard? Today I’d like to let you know about a few of them.

First of all, we added two new data sets to the details page of your gadgets. Now you can see intuitive graphs in the “Installations and Removals” tab, which shows the number of gadget installations and gadget removals, and in the “Browser Errors” tab, where you can see errors recently reported by our end users’ browsers.

As you may have guessed, adding this information made the gadget details page too long, so we introduced a tabular view for that page.

(The tabular view, showing the new “Installations and Removals” data)


(“Browser Errors” table showing the top errors reported by our users’ browsers)

Additionally, the dashboard had been only available in English, but we added 7 other langueges a while ago, so it is now available in 8 languages: English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. The localized iGoogle developer documentation will lead you to the localized dashboard. For example, after you select Japanese at http://code.google.com/apis/igoogle/, you will arrive at http://code.google.com/intl/ja/apis/igoogle/, which has a link for the Japanese version of the dashboard. Alternatively, you can explicitly add the URL parameter “?hl=ja” to the dashboard URL.

Lastly, in the next few days, we will start sending you weekly summary e-mails of your gadget usage. If you don’t want to receive these summary e-mails, you can opt-out from this service by just clicking a link at the bottom of the e-mail. The e-mails look like the following.

Gadget name: Weather

Author email: googlemodules@google.com

Pageviews: 1,000,000 (+5.00% compared to the week of May 30, 2011)

Unique users: ...

Installations: ...

Removals: ...

Browser errors: ...

Gadget name: Youtube Gadget

Author email: …

Pageviews: …

Unique users: ...

Installations: ...

Removals: ...

Browser errors: ...

…

…

...

As you can see, iGoogle is still evolving! Happy coding. :)

Posted by Takashi Matsuo, Developer Advocate

Live Gadget Previews in the iGoogle Directory

Monday, April 4, 2011 at 8:48 AM

The iGoogle Gadget Directory just got better. Users can now interact with a gadget in the directory before adding it to their page. Have a look at a couple examples like the Google News or Google Hot Trends gadgets.

Your gadgets can have live previews too. Gadgets that use Content view="default" already have a live preview in the gadget directory. Remember, view="default" can match any view supported by the container. Similarly, if the Content element in a gadget doesn't specify the view attribute, that's treated the same as if view="default" were present. Up until now, the only views that were supported on iGoogle were home and canvas; remember, home is the smaller version and canvas is the larger version.

Some gadgets are customized to display differently for the home and canvas views. If your gadgets do this, you can update the gadget XML spec to add a unique view for the preview or reuse an existing content element.

For gadgets with an element <Content view="home,canvas">
In this case you can just add preview, so you'll have view="home,canvas,preview".

For gadgets with <Content view="home">
Here too, you can reuse the home view for the preview by changing your spec to view="home,preview".

There are some other restrictions on the way the preview works. A preview can't use OpenSocial calls - since the user hasn't set the OpenSocial permissions before installing the gadget. You may want to address this in your gadget by making a special preview version that uses some dummy data, or you can opt out of the live preview and stick with a static screenshot.

Like all gadget views, the preview is cached. This reduces load and speeds up serving for users. But if you're working on your gadget and don't see a recent change in the preview, you can disable caching temporarily by adding the parameter "nocache=1" to the url.

Gadgets displayed as a preview also can't navigate to other views using requestNavigateTo(). If your gadget has a link that triggers changing the view it won't work in the preview.

If you feel a preview isn't the right choice for your gadget then specify the other views (home & canvas) and be sure that your screenshot does a good job of conveying what your gadget will do for users.

As always, come to the iGoogle Developer Forum to talk about live gadget previews with other iGoogle developers.

Posted by Rob Russell, Developer Relations

OpenSocial Development Environment 1.0 Released

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at 9:47 AM

OSDE (OpenSocial Development Environment) is an Eclipse plugin for developing and testing OpenSocial applications.

It's an Apache-2-licensed open-source project hosted at:

http://code.google.com/p/opensocial-development-environment/

Its milestone version 1.0 was released on June 22, 2010.

OSDE provides a rich set of features that both enable and enhance OpenSocial application development. It helps people building for both the client within a gadget, or even on another server using the Java RESTful client libraries. Its features include:

• A built-in Shindig server for local testing.
• An integrated database for storing and managing social data.
• Simple project and gadget code generation wizards to quickly generate your OpenSocial application projects and application code.
• A multi-paned gadget spec editor to facilitate gadget development.
• A new "OpenSocial" Eclipse perspective that provides enhanced editing and debugging with easy access and control of the local Shindig and social database.
• An OpenSocial REST Java client wizard that can quickly generate a new project along with sample code that uses the OpenSocial RESTful Java client library to connect to the local OpenSocial server. 
• Live testing against iGoogle server.
• Performance Analysis.

For details of installation and how to use it, please read the user guide at: https://sites.google.com/site/opensocialdevenv/user-guide

For bugs reporting or feature requests, please visit: http://code.google.com/p/opensocial-development-environment/issues/list

Thanks for your support.

Post content Posted by Albert Cheng, iGoogle Engineer

HTML5 in Gadgets on iGoogle

Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 2:26 PM

Did you know gadgets can use html5? The key is in the doctype. Normally the doctype of a gadget isn't mentioned. Specify the html5 doctype in the gadget and it will be used when the gadget is rendered. Let's look at a quick example using the popular canvas drawing API:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<Module>
 <ModulePrefs title="html5 canvas">
 </ModulePrefs>
 <Content type="html" view="home,canvas">
  <![CDATA[
   <!DOCTYPE html>
   <script>
    var demo = {
     init: function() {
      var drawcan = document.getElementById('drawarea');
      if (drawcan.getContext){
       var context = drawcan.getContext('2d');
       var xmax = drawcan.width;
       var ymax = drawcan.height;
       context.strokeRect(0,0,xmax,ymax);
       for (var dotix = 0; dotix < 100; ++dotix) {
        var x = Math.random() * xmax;var y = Math.random() * ymax;
        context.strokeStyle = "#888888";
        var blueness = Math.floor(Math.random() * 256);
        context.fillStyle = "rgb(10,90,"+ blueness +")";
        context.beginPath();
        context.arc(x,y,5,0,Math.PI*2,true);
        context.closePath();
        context.stroke();
        context.fill();
       }
      }
     }
    };
  
    gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler(demo.init);
 
   </script>
   <canvas id="drawarea" width="150" height="150"></canvas>
  ]]>
 </Content>
</Module>



The top of the gadget still has the usual XML prolog because the gadget spec is, as always, an XML document. The html, in this case html5, is inside a CDATA block. The CDATA block means the structure of the html5 content is pretty much ignored when parsing the XML. iGoogle doesn't do anything extra for compatibility with html5; features specific to html5 will still only work in browsers that support them. Gadgets have the same cross-browser compatibility concerns as any other web page. Have a look at the When can I use guide for an idea of compatibility of features across browsers.

The content of this gadget is pretty straightforward. It includes a canvas element. In the init method it tries to get a drawing context. If it's successful (meaning the browsers supports html5 canvas) it will draw a rectangle around the extents of the element then draw 10 randomly placed dots inside. Use this gadget as a starting point to get your own html5 gadget running.

And yes, this gadget has a canvas in your canvas so you can render when you render.

Posted by Rob Russell, Developer Relations Team

OSAPI on iGoogle

Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 6:40 PM

The OpenSocial 0.9 specification introduced a simpler API called OS Lite (also known as OSAPI) which uses a syntax that's friendlier for Javascript developers.

Some steely eyed developers have already noticed that iGoogle works with most OpenSocial 0.9 features. The implementation of OSAPI should work as documented at opensocial.org.

Here's a basic example to play with so you can get started with the OS Lite API. In this example we will execute a request to fetch and display a list of the user's friends.


<Module>
 <ModulePrefs height="800" title="osapi friends" title_url="http://code.google.com">
  <Require feature="opensocial-0.9" />
  <Require feature="osapi" />
 <Content type="html" view="home">
  <![CDATA[
  <script>
   var result = '';
    osapi.people.get({userId:'@owner', groupId:'@friends'}).execute(function(response) {
    result += 'You have ' + response.list.length + ' friends:<ul>';
    for (item in response.list) {
     result += '<li>' + response.list[item]';
    }
    document.getElementById("output").innerHTML = result + '</ul>';
   });
  ]]>
 </Content>
</Module>


To keep it short we've omitted detailed error handling in our example. It should be pretty clear what the script is doing but it's good to check response.error and gracefully handle problems.
The first call, osapi.people.get({userId: '@owner', groupId: '@friends'}) constructs a request object to get a list of people for the current user from their friends group. The call to execute will make a call to the service, passing the results to a callback function. Our callback is a simple anonymous function that across the result set.
When running the code, look at the JSON response from iGoogle and you'll see that the data structure is pretty straightforward. Use some of the tools built into your browser such as:

• Firebug if you are using Firefox
• Chrome or Safari Developer tools.
• Opera Dragonfly
• Internet Explorer 8's debugger

These tools help debug your Javascript but also can show you the HTTP messages that are going to iGoogle from your gadget and the responses iGoogle sends back. There's also the OpenSocial Developer App which is a gadget that will build arbitrary messages that you can incorporate in test code.

As we get more OpenSocial 0.9 tested out on iGoogle, we'll update the documentation to reflect the current functionality.

If you like OSAPI and you're going to be at Google I/O 2010, you can find us in the Hack Alcove on May 20 2010 from 2-3:30pm. We'll give a walk through of a gadget built with osapi for iGoogle gadget developers. There's also a talk for iGoogle developers at I/O on May 20 2010 at 10:15am.

Posted by Rob Russell and Paul Kinlan, Developer Relations