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Wednesday 9 May 2007

Googlereader & the wii [Slim]

There shouldn't be any doubt in your mind that the codemonkey warlocks at google are as we speak weaving procedural spells that will take over all life as we know it. As evidence of this, consider the recent Wii support that's been added the the already marvelous google reader.
I'd discovered these modifications myself while dicking around with my own Wii browser, and was instantly impressed. They'd clearly been written with someone who knows exactly what the issues are in using the wii for browsing, and had considered how to solve them with the wiimote in mind. The result is a full screen of news headlines, with navigation assigned to a button on your wiimote. You dont even need to scroll using the on screen controlls, you simply press the down arrow on the 'mote. This simply rules, you can kick back on the sofa, browse your headlines without even raising your hand to the screen. Your folder navigation is a button press away, and can also be navigated using the arrows.
What's astounding is the way these mods are delivered to the public:

"Some weekend hacking confirmed my suspicions, and the rest of the team also seemed to think it'd be a neat side project. As some have discovered, we recently flipped the switch on this feature. If you'd like to try it out, simply visit reader.google.com on your Wii (you may find it even easier to just do a Google search for "reader"). Keep in mind that this is something very experimental, the labs of Google Labs if you will."

..this isn't even a project at google, it's someone just dicking around! I hope this is a success, I'd love to see a similar interface for picassaweb and gmail and I recon the PS3 browser could be enhanced similarly.

2 comments:

  1. Google do have a very interesting work ethos. You get to spend 20% of your working week "tossing off" on personal projects like this. It's blimmin' marvellous. Gmail was one of these noddy projects. Makes ya think. If I asked my boss if I could spend a day a week tossing off he'd think I was mad.
    The fact of course is I spend 100% of my week tossing off, fiddling about with interweb stuff.

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  2. Yeah, that sort project is time well spent if you have the right people with some ideas.
    During my last project I 'slacked off' by creating an alternative Visual Source Safe explorer that was savvy to labels used as version numbers for code 'drops'. People in my dept can now get a specific signed off version of code out for any development & is a bit slicker to use than VSS explorer.
    Will the fuckers use it? Don't suppose so, they'll probably cary on fucking up when they could use this instead.

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