Tuesday 20 May 2008
iGoogle Roadmap
Since the launch of the developer sandbox, many of you have asked when the new features of iGoogle will find their way into users' hands. We plan to release canvas view and the new interface first, sometime in June. Those of you with existing applications should add a canvas view to take advantage of more screen real estate. And using canvas view, you can also monetize with ads.
Social features, including the OpenSocial API, updates, and notifications, will roll out later during the summer. As each of these releases approaches, we'll give you more specific dates. And as they become available, we'll roll out more updates to the interface and API to the sandbox.
Checkout these slides from the OpenSocial Summit for more details on iGoogle. If you have questions about iGoogle or the roadmap, please visit the iGoogle Developer Forum.
Up and running
Everything is back up and running in the sandbox, and should work just as before. If you're experiencing any issues, feel free to post in the iGoogle Developer Forum.
Unscheduled downtime
This is just a quick message to let everyone know that the developer sandbox is currently down. The outage should be relatively short — the sandbox should return sometime this afternoon. A follow-up to this message will appear when the sandbox is back online.
Friday 9 May 2008
There's no place like home, canvas
One of the features of the iGoogle sandbox is the notion of views, the ability to target content to different display areas. Views are supported across OpenSocial containers, but each container may support a different set of views. To help you re-use your gadgets, we've added a new views feature to the sandbox.
In the iGoogle sandbox, there are two views. The home view is the smaller of the two, comparable in size to iGoogle gadgets running outside of the sandbox. The canvas view presents a "full-screen" version of a gadget, filling all of the room available on the iGoogle page.
In other OpenSocial containers such as orkut, there are also multiple views. In orkut there is a profile view and a canvas view. The profile view is a similar size to the home view in iGoogle.
For some gadgets, it may be appropriate to display similar information on a user's orkut profile view as in a user's iGoogle home view, or across other views in OpenSocial containers. Previously, the solution to this problem was duplication of code, by creating two content sections, one for profile and one for home, both with the same content. Now, I'm happy to tell you that these views can be concatenated into one view by declaring view="home,profile" in a single content section.
This also means that gadgets that handle presentation logic for differently sized views in a single content section can extend that support to the canvas page by declaring view="home,canvas".
Details on concatenated views will soon appear in the section on views in the iGoogle Developer's Guide.
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