Webware

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Google on Tuesday announced a dashboard to detail system status for the Google App Engine.

The move is the latest by a cloud provider to improve transparency in the event of an outage.

On the Google App Engine blog, the company said that it has launched the App Engine system status site and a quota dashboard to detail items like bandwidth usage and CPU. Google said it also plans a billing dashboard to preview what happens if you go beyond those quotas.

Here's a look at the dashboard:

(Credit: Google)

Been looking for a way to get the 'peanut butter jelly time' guy onto Facebook? Look no longer.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Amnesty Hypercube, which is probably the best name I've seen this year, has a new Facebook app that's pretty handy if you're a user of their desktop application. Like its other "Amnesty" services, the new app from the folks at Mesa Dynamics takes pretty much any widget code you can throw at it, and runs it in Facebook. In turn, it syncs up with Amnesty's desktop widget app, meaning any widgets you add at home will be available without having to re-add them.

There are several reasons why this is useful. One is for the widgets you enjoy using on your iGoogle page, or OS X Dashboard can now be viewed right in Facebook instead. If you're the kind of person who spends a lot of time there, this might beat keeping an extra browser tab open. This also takes an extra step out of managing one of your Facebook apps, which is especially helpful if you've got quite a few.

The only bummer here is the interface which relegates each widget to its own mini tab in Facebook, meaning you can't view all of them at once like you can with other widget services. You also can't stick them on your profile, which could arguably be a good thing considering how crowded people's profiles have become. What I was really hoping for with this service, was a way to take any widget code and stick it on your profile similar to what you can do with MySpace, although in a more user friendly fashion, and without the need to add a new Facebook application every time. I'm not saying the idea here isn't well-founded, but if you're looking for straight up widgets, you're probably better off using a bona fide widget aggregation site than surfing a bunch of tabs.

Related: Webware's roundup of single page aggregators

In case you hadn't noticed, today is "International Talk Like a Pirate Day," which means it's socially acceptable to start speaking in tongues to your friends, family, and coworkers without them being able to roll their eyes as much as they usually do. It's also a time to check out Flickr, who has managed to translate the entirety of the site to pirate-speak. To toggle this option, just go down to the bottom of the page and select "Arrr!" as the language. Flickr's logo changes, along with all the menus, greeting messages, and of course, references to your groups and contacts which are now referred to as your "crew" and "mateys."

To a quick-and-dirty version of this for any site, you can also run any old URL through the Pirate-Speak Generator, which will turn your "my's" into "me's" and generally turn all instances of proper English into the language of ship-born scallywags.


Find Flickr's secret pirate mode by picking 'Arrr!' from the language selection.
(Credit: CNET Networks)

Other pirate resources:

• The pirate name generator, which will tell you exactly what your name would be if you decided to become a pirate. And in case you were wondering, it's not your middle name and the name of your first pet put together.

• Pirate translator OS X Dashboard widget. Today might be the holiday, but there are still 364 other days to speak like a pirate. Make use of them by keeping this handy widget in your Dashboard repertoire.

• The Sea Pirates Flash game. If you've ever played Zelda, you'll know the importance of sailing a ship around while trying to avoid oceanic peril. This game involves pillaging local islands at whim. It's up to you and the wind to make your way through the ocean while staying alive. You get bonus points for boarding enemy pirate ships and digging up buried treasure, too.

  Anyone find any other fun pirate day Easter eggs on their favorite sites? Share 'em in the TalkBack.

Amnesty Hypercube is a small application for Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X that will help you pull bits of Web content to use as widgets. These widgets can be brought up or dismissed ad hoc, or added to your desktop as a permanent fixture. Besides its cool name (second only to flux capacitor), the service is not so different from many existing widget platforms, like Yahoo Widgets, OS X's Dashboard, or the Windows Vista sidebar. Yet the company is taking a slightly different approach, one a little closer to Yourminis, which uses Adobe Integrated Runtime to run widgets on your desktop.

The application has a built-in directory of widget sites, which acts as a mini-Web browser to take you to places such as Finetune, last.fm, and eBay's eBay To Go widget maker. Once you've found embed code on a site's original page, copying the code to your clipboard will automatically turn it into a desktop widget. Of course, you could accomplish something similar using Mesa Dynamics' other tool--Amnesty Generator, which will convert all sorts of Web widget code into widget-friendly code for other platforms.

One nice feature on the Mac and Vista version is that you can "push" a Hypercube widget to OS X's dashboard or the Vista sidebar with two clicks. Also neat is its multiwidget desktop functionality (hence the cube name), which lets you organize your widgets on several virtual desktops. You can add more widgets and switch between them from the drop-down menu that installs itself on your system toolbar. It's a little bit like the upcoming Spaces feature in OS X Leopard, but not nearly as flashy.

The only real snag I ran into using the application was surfing through the widget directory. Since it's a miniaturized browser, pages are often cropped below their native size, unless you are using a wide-screen display or are running your computer at a high resolution. This means there's a lot more scrolling both up and down, as well as side to side, if you're on a laptop or small screen. I'd also like to see the service add a right-click contextual menu to let you create a widget from any embed code you run into while browsing on your regular browser. Currently, you have to copy and paste code into a preferences box on the application.

Mesa Dynamics is planning to add a few more features to the beta release, including sharable cubes (similar to the publicly shared page directories on single-page aggregators), cube customizations such as backgrounds and color schemes, and a tool to push a widget collection to Apple's iPhone.

Grab widgets from all over the Web and put them on your desktop. If you're a Mac or Vista user, you can also push widgets to Dashboard or the sidebar to use the native widget tools.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

At Apple's WWDC a few weeks ago, the crowd was oohing and aahing when Steve Jobs showed off one of Leopard's new features called Web Clip. Web Clip is a feature built into the Leopard version of Apple's Safari browser that lets you take a section of any Web site and turn it into a widget for OS X's Dashboard. WWDC 2007 wasn't the first time Apple had shown off Web Clip. In fact, the feature had been demonstrated at last year's WWDC conference in August, although not during the high-profile keynote.

For Mac users who don't feel like waiting until October to get their hands on Leopard, an enterprising developer has created a widget called Dash Clipping that has nearly identical functionality to Web Clip and runs in Tiger. Users just plug in a URL and the Web page will open up right inside the widget. It's essentially a miniature browser that can be cropped and maneuvered to fit the desired content. Users can also set how often they want the widget to refresh.

Dash Clipping isn't quite as easy to use as Leopard's implementation, as users can't just toggle a Web Clip right from the browser (a feature that's only available in Leopard's version of Safari) or highlight various sections of the page with a neat light-box effect. Also, like Web Clip, it's also only useful with sites that present their content within certain boundaries, such as online crosswords, comic strips, and news sites with fairly standardized layouts like Yahoo and AOL's start pages.

I haven't been able to track down a similar widget for any of the Windows widget engines like Yahoo Widgets or Vista's sidebar. If you find one, please feel free to post it in the TalkBack.

To make your own custom widget out of any part of a Web site, check out Dash Clippings.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Scott Adams)

• StumbleUpon/eBay talks heat up. The Wall Street Journal is reporting (registration required) that a deal between eBay and StumbleUpon to acquire the social networking and content recommendation service is getting closer. No agreement has been made on price, but the rumored amount brings it somewhere near $75 million dollars. If acquired, StumbleUpon's content preference algorithms could be employed on eBay's auction listings to give eBay users a new way to get recommendations on things they might want to buy. (CNET News.com Blog)

• Last.fm launching video service. As reported by the Register in March, Last.fm will release a music video service this week. Last.fm users will be able to make their own sharable music video playlists, using high-quality video content from a number of legal independent content providers, with mainstream content from Warner and EMI on the way later this year. The new video service will still leverage Last.fm's music recommendation technology to introduce people to new music. (via ReadWriteWeb)

• Windows Live Messenger now on the Xbox 360. Owners of Microsoft's Xbox 360 can chat with others using Windows Live Messenger, now a part of the 360's system software. Live Messenger buddies show up alongside the regular friends list, and can live video chat via the Xbox 360's Live Vision camera. 360 users also get special status messages that show what game they're playing for anyone who sees them using the PC client. (via Crave)

Google Analytics relaunched today, adding several new visualization tools and ways to share data with others. The tool gives Web site owners a free and relatively easy system to keep track of how people are accessing content on their site, including ways to track which content is getting the most views, how much time each user is spending on the site, and the number of visits by time of day. There's also a handy map overlay which will show you where your users are, right down to the city they live in.

No it's not an episode of Jericho, it's site usage by geography.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

One of the updated features is the Analytics dashboard, which is now completely customizable and has simplified data. Users can relocate, add, and remove the various data widgets, in a similar fashion to that of iGoogle. Also new is the option to e-mail or export reports as PDFs, which can now be scheduled to be sent out automatically every day, week, month or quarter using a built-in calendar. Previously you were only able to export it as a non-human-friendly XML file.

The service is mainly an extension of Google's AdWords program, which lets site owners purchase words that link to various parts of their site via contextual ads that show up on Google or partnered search engine results. But even if you're not interested in making money it's a free Analytics solution that requires no software, just a line of code on any page you want to keep track of. If you're a WordPress user, there's even a plug-in to automatically add it to your site. Blogger users are also able to add it by tweaking their blog template.

There's more information about the update on the Google Analytics Blog post. For more screenshots of the new dashboard, keep reading.

This is Google Analytic's new dashboard. Each stat box is its own widget, and can be moved around or closed ad-hoc.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

YourMinis, the popular single page aggregator service, has launched desktop integration with its library of over 14 million widgets, using Adobe's Apollo technology. After installing the Apollo runtime and the YourMinis Apollo plug-in on your PC or Mac, you can simply click on any widget in the YourMinis library and click "Add to Desktop." Likewise, there's the option to send any widget to the Web if you'd prefer it to stay on one of your YourMinis pages. It's really well-done.

Once they're on your desktop, you can drag them around, change colors, transparency levels, and various settings for each widget--the usual features that come with a full-fledged widget application.

Mac users likely will be uninterested with the new feature, as they've already got a built-in widget engine with OS X's Dashboard. PC users, on the other hand, now have another free way to put widgets on their desktop besides Yahoo Widgets and Google Desktop. As we've mentioned before, Apollo is still pretty early on in development, and the YourMinis widgets are RAM-hungry. With just four open, they were taking up more CPU cycles and memory than Microsoft Word and Outlook combined. It will be interesting to see how Adobe addresses this problem further along in Apollo's development.

See also News.com's take on how Apollo is 'one-upping' Ajax.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

There are a lot of widgets out there. So many, in fact, that sorting through them can be absolutely daunting. Joining the fray of sites that attempt to solve this problem is Widgipedia, a site that catalogs and hosts widgets, both Web-based and downloads. We've covered competitor Widgetbox several times, and the two sites are quite similar. Where Widgipedia differs is in mixing up widgets that run on different platforms: those that run right in your browser and ones you download for various engines such as Mac OS X's Dashboard and Yahoo Widgets. The result is a diverse listing that's fun to explore and play around with.

To sort through all the entries, Widgipedia employs tags instead of categories. This ends up working out pretty well for searching, as long as widgets have been tagged correctly. I still prefer Widgetbox's organization structure with its tags and nine comprehensive categories, which is a little more user friendly. As the site grows, there definitely needs to be some categorization.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

For budding widget designers, there's a dedicated section of widget-creation resources complete with step-by-step how-tos and links to helpful walk-throughs. All the information is relegated to the forums, but there's plenty in there to get a newbie going.

Widgipedia is a great place to browse for new widgets. The site is fairly young, but it already has a pretty diverse collection of neat widgets. If you're a widget developer looking to keep track of what's happening to your widgets, you're likely better off using Widgetbox for its metrics service. If you're just looking to spice up your social-networking profile or desktop widget collection, Widgipedia is definitely worth bookmarking.