06 June 2008, 13:40

Google Gadgets for Linux

Due to popular user demand, Google has now released its desktop gadgets in a version for Linux. The release is a trial version and may still contain some bugs. Jim Zhuang, a member of the software engineering team, says in his blog that porting was a complex undertaking because gadget support is not just a single feature, but rather an entire platform for miniature applications. Because of the cross platform interoperability, Linux users can already access many existing gadgets with this first release.

The Linux versions of the miniature desktop applications are available under Apache License 2.0 and so far have only been released as source code. The main components of the package are the gadget library and a program used for selecting and starting gadgets. The latter is available both as a GTK and a Qt version. Unlike the Qt version, the GTK program offers a sidebar. Google has made instructions for compiling the source code available online. A detailed API reference is available for developers who want to create their own gadgets

(trk)

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