“You won’t be surprised to learn that we like to mix a healthy dose of fun into work. Our Mac team engineers spend their 20% time developing interesting experiments, useful tools, and just-for-fun software,” Amit Singh, Google’s Engineering Manager, and Karen Grünberg, Google’s Product Manager write for The Official Google Mac Blog.
“We’ve always had a place to showcase our consumer products. Today, we’re unveiling the Google Mac Developer Playground, a website where the Mac community can look for new and interesting open source projects and demos from our Mac team. You’ll find a variety of projects that we work on in our 20% time, like Cover Story, as well as our more mature open source projects such as MacFUSE and the GData libraries,” Singh and Grünberg write.
“One new demo we want to highlight today is Statz. Dave MacLachlan, one of the engineers working on Google Desktop Mac, created it in his ‘spare”‘ time. Statz lets you coordinate your status messages across various IM clients. If you have more than one IM client, we think this will come in handy,” Singh and Grünberg write.
Full article here.
The Google Mac Developer Playground is here.
Does the Google Mac Developer Playground let you slide into a sandbox? Or get off your hobby horse and swing into action?
This is a hoax
This could be useful and fun:
“A collection of Quartz Composer Patches. These patches require Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) or better.
– Ambient Light Sensor: use the ambient light in the room as inputs. Only works with machines with ambient light sensors (e.g. MacBook Pro)
– Motion Sensor: use the motion sensors as inputs. Only works with machines with motion sensors (e.g. MacBook Pro). Uses the Unimotion library.
Install these patches into “/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Plug-Ins” and then launch up Quartz Composer and play.”
http://code.google.com/p/google-mac-qtz-patches/
Sudden Motion Sensor is built into all portable Macs (not just MB Pro).
This story demonstrates Google’s complete commitment to the Mac community.
Good for Apple, the Mac faithful and everyone else in the Apple hemisphere.
I think this is awesome.
k. Got the Statz app.That one seems pretty convenient. You guys are into Quartz? Cool. Everybody’s tried Cam Twist, right? Layer-able Quartz effects galore for our webcams. Free and tres fun! heh. Google it.
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errr … perhaps I spoke too soon. Statz doesn’t seem to be working for me. It accepts input, but doesn’t appear to act upon the input .. Ummm, maybe the next version ….
Now we just need Picasa for Mac. My switch will be totally complete once they come out with this great piece of software for the platform. iPhoto just isn’t doing it for me.