Details on the iGoogle Canvas View Launch

Dan Holevoet, Developer Programs

I thought I'd take a moment to clarify some details of upcoming iGoogle features and their release schedule. I've spoken to many of you who had questions about exactly what features would be available in iGoogle when canvas views are released. When canvas views and the new interface appear in production:

• Existing _IG_ calls will continue to work normally, including all IG calls used to fetch remote content
• The new gadgets feature 'views', gadgets.view and requestNavigateTo will be added to your repertoire of valid function calls
• Declaring view="home,canvas" will become valid
• The rest of the gadgets.* and opensocial.* APIs will not yet work. For example, all user customizations and data should be handled via user prefs and not app data for the time being

If you're working on a new gadget, or upgrading an older gadget to use the new canvas view, you should continue to use _IG_ calls, and keep the above list in mind. We are going to start testing the canvas view with a small percentage of our users this month, and are scheduled to roll it out to more users during July.

If you are developing a canvas view for our upcoming release, you should not use "<require feature="opensocial-X"/>" as gadgets that use gadgets.* and opensocial.* will not work in production until later this summer. Note that the sandbox will continue to support these features so that you can work on social features and gadgets in parallel and have all tools available to you.

Thanks again for all your contributions to iGoogle. If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know in our developer forum.