Mainly Macintosh

Google Macintosh Dashboard Widget for Blogger

In February 2006, Google introduced 3 Dashboard widgets for the Macintosh.

One of those is kind of handy for Macintosh users. It offers a no-frills blog posting tool for Blogger users.


Google Macintosh Dashboard Widgets:

Widgets are mini-applications that you download and install into Dashboard to add new functionality.

The widget works. However, It lacks the ability to blockquote, boldface, italicize, hyperlink, and spell check blog posts. Those capabilities all come with the Google Toolbar.

By the way, Blogger.com is the site you go to in order to post something to you blog(s) at Blogspot.com.

If Google enriches the functionality of the widget a little bit - say, by adding a WYSIWYG toolbar - and a button to add a Technorati keyword for the currently selected word to the post - that would make it very useful.

From what I can tell, WYSIWYG rich text editing from web GUIs is not very hard these days. At least with Firefox, it is not. It seems to have a built-in feature called MIDAS that provides this capability. I am not sure if Safari/Dashboard have this capability though.

So it might be a lot of work for Google to add this functionality to their Dashboard widget.

By the way, here is something humorous about the spell checker for Google BlogThis! feature of their Firefox toolbar that works with Google Blogger.

The words I struck out in the previous sentence are not recognized by the spell checker!

Whoops.

posted by John Collins @ 10:55 AM