If you just want to get going without reading this article - download the gadget now.

Soon after JobServe Labs was launched, we launched the Windows Desktop Job Search Gadget – which enables you to execute job searches, and view full job details, directly from your Windows Desktop.  Immediately we saw huge interest in this gadget (as a result we updated it to version 0.2 today), which has convinced us that providing our services in ways other than the web-browser is the right way to move forward.

Not everybody was happy, though, because not everybody is running Windows as their preferred desktop operating system, and even if they are it’s still likely to be Windows XP or 2003 – which doesn’t support the Windows Sidebar platform.

So, immediately we got back on the case and started looking at an alternative Job Search gadget that could be used by even more people; and which can be accessed from Linux, Mac OS-X or Windows.  Mac OS-X, like Windows Vista or 7, has it’s own proprietary Gadget platform – the Dashboard and it’s Widgets, and we did look at developing a stand-alone version for that.  However, in the end, we’ve decided to go for the Google Desktop Gadget Platform as it’s the one that probably has the most users, and it is indeed available on all three aforementioned OS flavours.

What does it look like?

Here are two screenshots of the Gadget:

This is from one of our Windows Server 2003 x64 development boxes.  Click on the image for a larger version.

This is from an Ubuntu 9.04 virtual machine that we’re running inside Virtual PC on a Dev machine.  We used these very helpful steps to get everything up and running, and all-told it took just 15 minutes.  If you have a windows domain-based corporate web-proxy, however, you might want to get your support team to allow your Ubuntu box out of it without having to authenticate (or push it through another proxy that doesn’t require authentication), as we couldn’t get web access working properly until we did that.  Firefox’s proxy configuration worked fine, but the system-wide proxy configuration didn’t – there appears to be a bug with NTLM authentication.

Incidentally, if you’re running the Ubuntu Jaunty and you need to install Google Gadgets for Linux, then you should find it on the package manager in the ‘Internet’ section – there’s a GTK and a Qt version.  If you’re running openSUSE, then the binaries are also included in the official repository.  The GGL team have written some excellent documentation about where to get the binaries from, depending on the distribution that you run.

If you’re running Google Desktop for Mac OS-X, you should be able to use this gadget as well, as we’ve followed all the guidelines on how to ensure cross-platform functionality. Despite all this, however, there is still an element of the dark-arts about this, and we’d really appreciate any feedback from Mac users as to how successful we’ve been in delivering a desktop search for you guys.

Is it as fast as the Windows Sidebar Gadget?

In a word, yes.  The code is using exactly the same JSON web service that the windows gadget uses, the only differences are:

• How the UI has been implemented – since the Windows Gadget platform is html and JavaScript based, whereas the Google Desktop Gadget platform uses a proprietary XML format for UI, and strict JavaScript for application code.
• How we talk to the web service.  In the Windows Gadget we’ve embedded the excellent jQuery library, and use it’s $.getJSON method to get the search results.  With the Google Gadget we have to program against XMLHttpRequest directly in order to be sure to maximise cross-platform compatibility.

How to use it

You have two editable textboxes to use to specify your query terms.  The ‘skills’ box is what you’re looking for, and the ‘location’ box is, clearly, where you want it to be.  This should not be a country – since you also have a country dropdown that you should use for this – it should ideally be a town, village, county or state.  Our skills search query (and location query for that matter) supports Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and quoted expressions (“Visual Basic”, “Business Objects”, “Management Training”).  For example, if you want a C# job that also involves Sql Server (quoted expression), but you don’t want to work in London – then this is the kind of search you need:

The gadget will always remember your last search parameters, so if you remove the gadget from your desktop and put it back on again, your last search will already be pre-filled.

The gadget is fully resizable whether it is docked or not.  The value of resizing horizontally beyond a certain width is pretty minimal, however, resizing vertically is a huge plus as it means you can see more results in one go. 

The inner results list is scrollable by using the green buttons that appear at the top and bottom.  We would like to have used a scrollbar for this, however, the scrollbars for DIV elements and list boxes do not appear within those elements when the gadget is docked.  We could have used the Scrollbar control to implement this, however the problem with that is that it takes away valuable horizontal space in which to display our job results.

Our solution was to use the beginAnimation method of the View object when either our up or down buttons are clicked.  The gadget calculates the page size, in terms of result-count, that can currently be displayed based on its height.  This is turned into pixels (by virtue of the fact that each of our results is a fixed height), and then we slide the results list up or down by that number of pixels in our animation call-back.  This article contains lots of examples of how to animate your own Google gadget; the thing we like the most about this is that it’s not tied down to directly visible attributes of the UI: the beginAnimation method is simply a timed slide between two values, therefore how you interpret that value is entirely up to you.

Ideas and suggestions

As always, we’ll be looking for ways to make this gadget even better to make it easier and faster to use; we also really want your ideas and suggestions for this or any other gadget or feature.  You never know, you could be the source of the next idea to come out of JobServe Labs!