Google Gadgets Makes The Move To Mac

Up until this point Google Gadgets, the widgets or small applications that run in Google Desktop, were only available for versions of the Windows operating system. Although Mac OS X user have the Dashboard feature complete with a wide variety of downloadable widgets, Google's directory of more than 27,000 gadgets dwarfs the seemingly sparse collection of just over 3300 widgets in the Dashboard widget directory.

Now, however, Mac users will be able to use any of the Gadgets tomorrow, when Google releases the Google Desktop for Mac software update which will add the support for integration of any of the available gadgets onto a user's Apple machine.

Best of all, the new gadgets will integrate into the existing Apple Dashboard, working seamlessly aside existing Apple widgets. How does a selection of 30,770 widgets sound to choose from?

The new desktop software will require version 10.4 or higher of OS X. Once the update is complete, the process of finding and installing new gadgets is a breeze. Unlike the Windows version, however, there will be no sidebar since everything is added to the dashboard. “For users, this means they can install hundreds of Google Gadgets with just one click and run them in Dashboard. They can also use Gadgets to enhance their personal Web sites by copying and pasting the HTML into the page's source code,” states Google.

This is great news for Mac users who may have felt limited by Apple's smaller selection of widgets, but it also benefits those developers who previously would have had to create a version of an app for the Apple Dashboard and then a separate version for Google Desktop. Now, only the Google version is necessary, which could possibly result in fewer new additions to Apple's directory.

Gadgets are slowly becoming more universal as Google spreads their use to various platforms. Not too long ago support for gadgets was added to iGoogle, easing the developer headache of creating an application for Desktop as well as one for iGoogle.

The last major operating system left for Google to tackle is Linux, which shouldn't be too complicated. I am sure that Google is already aware of this though, and they probably already have development under way.

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