My Thoughts! - by Prakash G.R.

written by Prakash G.R.

Did you notice that the Google Reader now offers offline mode? It can download and save your files so that you can read them even when you are not connected to the internet. It is powered by Google Gears. I tried to create an application by going thru the steps in the Developer Guide Tutorial. It was not that easy to follow it. It could have be a bit more simpler. If you are looking for a simpler version, its available here.

written by Prakash G.R.

If you are using Gmail & Firefox, then Better Gmail is a must have Firefox extension. It gives you skins for Gmail, puts your Google Reader feeds, saves your searches, etc. Try it.

Related Links:
Top 10 Firefox extensions I use

written by Prakash G.R.

The first time I heard about Google Web Toolkit, I was excited. I immediately downloaded it; wrote few samples and found that it was really a nice piece of software. But it lacked one thing - IDE integration. Although “GWT was intentionally designed to work well in any IDE”, there was no direct support for GWT in any IDE. I thought how about writing an Eclipse plugin for that? I’m not an Eclipse plugin developer. I was a pure C++ guy who has jumped into several layers of J2EE and .NET and settled as a mainline developer in a top SOA product. Eclipse plugin development is something I’ve to learn. I decided to give a try.

Result? Googlipse. That is my first plugin. With over 25,000 downloads and counting, it generated a good amount of interest. So I get bugs (yeah, sometimes I write embarrassing code) and people extend it. It was a wonderful experience in learning Eclipse and gave me a better understanding about the Open Source from the contributing perspective. Googlipse has shifted my career and now my day job is also plugin development. Besides all this, I’ve to kill Googlipse. Why? Because of the name!

I was over enthusiastic that I coined the name by joining two names: Google+Eclipse. The logo is also the same way, Google colored text in an Eclipse background. I thought who cares about the name. I was wrong.

Google’s legal department had “some trademark concerns about the name”. I was pointed to Google Branding Guidelines. So I decided to change the name and logo. Hmmmm. That means its virtually creating a new product (at least to the users who don’t worry about the code!) That is what I’ve done now. I’ve created a brand new product called “Cypal Studio for GWT“. It is hosted @ Google Code. Its essentially the same code base (with the same Apache 2.0 license) but with little changes and few bug fixes.

So what happens to Googlipse now? Its dead. Means there will be no more bug fixes, no more features. The existing downloads & code base will remain there @ SourceForge. The home page will be soon pointing to new product’s site (which is under development). Thus ends the story of my first Eclipse Plugin.

written by Prakash G.R.

This below picture says it all

written by Prakash G.R.

I don’t know what harm I did to Google. Its been targeting my blog for weird search terms. For the past one week, its sarees color. Check these search terms with Google:

sari color of 2006

orange color sarees

blue and purple shaded sarees

And another thing I don’t understand is, why would anyone search in Google for a colorful saree? Shouldn’t they go to The Chennai Silks/Pothy’s/Nalli? hmmm. Gals!

[Update:15,Nov,2006]

After a week, I thought that saree stuff is over. And then someone landed in this blog for this query: “What color saree suits a dark woman“. LOL!

written by Prakash G.R.

No this is not a post about Google’s Calendar or Notebook. Its rather about the GWT - the Google Web Toolkit. Some time back I wrote an entry about Ajax and how hard it would be to maintain a code. Now to make developers life simple, Google has released their Ajax framework. This is the same framework that runs Gmail! At a first look it looks great. I’m going to try it out and give a detailed post later.

written by Prakash G.R.

As I said in last post, Google is a very innovative company. It has many of the very finest talents in the IT industry. Gmail is a wonderful application that is changing the way web is being used. XMLHttpRequest and async javascript is not new to the web. Its been used in very little places. But Gmail extensively made use of that and created gmail. The rest is a history. Now the combination of XML, Javascript and XMLHttpRequest is put together in a buzz world called Ajax and its driving the world crazy. Every major web technology company is already providing support for Ajax or promised support for Ajax. In the early days of gmail, I myself has tried out recreating an small existing web page with Ajax. With barely no support from any of the IDEs of that time, it was too hard. The worst part making it stable and maintaining it. Conventional techniques of web page state maintenance is all null and void with Ajax - no matter what is the technology used to create dynamic page(JSP, ASP, PHP, etc) Now the user is not going to click on a button and wait for the response. The UI is still available to him and he is allowed to click on any other button. The result is similar to a single threaded application converted to multithreaded application! Ajax is not the only thing gmail introduced to the world. There are several other hard-to-do and highly impossible things that has been accomplished. Have you ever looked at the “Attach file” option? Without showing the browse button or the text box, gmail allows to us to attach a file. Its a really tough thing to make it work. Another impossible thing to do is it allows us to dynamically increment the number of file to attach. (For the curious, here is the reason) I’ve tried my best to crack down how they do it. But cudn’t Can show several examples like that - chat in gmail, spell checker etc, but enough of the positive side.

Now here comes the ugly face of the of Google - application integration. Applications are good as individual units. But integrating them is not that easy. Think of these two applications from Google - Picasa and Google screen saver. With Picasa you can change several settings of an image (contrast, color correction,..) and can do basic fixes (crop, red eye removal, …) Google screensaver can show pictures when activated. It doesn’t respect the changes that Picasa has done on the images. As a result, Google screensaver shows raw unedited pictures. Those pictures look odd and the screensaver is less useful when it can’t even rotate the images properly.

Another simple instance. Google has a wonderful spell checker in its search engine. It would automatically suggest you the right spelling (try this), but its another product, blogger.com has one of the worst spell checking engine. It can’t even recognize the word blog! Its kind of funny. A company which has one of the best spell checker and which has a separate blog search says blog as a spelling error in its own blogging portal. itha than yaanaikum adi sarukumnu sollurangalo?

written by Prakash G.R.

Google has been innovating and making us to think the way we used to look at web. They make web as a platfrom and create applications that are as useful as a desktop client. Gmail and Google reader are the classic ones! Now here comes Google Creator - a web based HTML editor and free hosting like geocities. Within two hours of opening, I tried to create a page, but the maximum number of uses has already reached :-/ Only a very limited users were allowed to use Google Creator. Guess what? One of them created a page against Google’s censorship policy in China. Check this!

written by Prakash G.R.

Finally the rumours came true. After much hype, Google released its IM Client. As with the other Google products, it has cool, simple and easy to use interface. The exe file size and the memory foot print are very smaller. With no file transfer, no skins, no font selection, no smileys etc, it doesn’t make much sense to move to this immediately. How good is Google Talk, if we can’t talk? They have a VoIP implementation too. Although you can call & talk only to other Google Talk people, my guess would be that they will announce a premium service, where you can call the PSTN network too.

On another track, I just discovered that you can send mails from your Gmail id, as if you are sending from another id. This feature is very useful for me. I’ve subscribed to some groups thru my Yahoo id. Whenever I need to send any mails, I need to use Yahoo! Mail. Now that I’ve registered my Yahoo id with Gmail, I can send mails from Gmail itself, with my Yahoo id in the From column. Further you can specify Gmail id in the Reply-To field, so that the replies will be delivered to Gmail and you can start communicating with those individuals from Gmail id itself. Cool huh? Click here for more info.

written by Prakash G.R.