Google Desktop Gadget v0.2 released!

2009-10-14T18:00:46+01:00

Following on from the recent release of v0.3 of the Windows Sidebar Gadget, as promised we’ve now updated our Google Gadget to include most of the same feature-set.

If you want to go and test drive it now, simply go ahead and download it! If you’ve previously downloaded it from the Google Gadget Directory, then you can still download it straight from us – but it’ll also appear as an update in your gadget list after few days of it being live.

So what’s changed?

The original gadget allowed you to search for jobs with a particular skills keyword search, in a particular location and country. The first minor improvement we’ve made is to add a new country: ‘All’:

As you can see above – the country selection is ‘All countries and areas’. Be careful with this one if you are after a single location in the world. In the query above, for example, I’ve searched for SQL jobs in ‘London’. This could mean London, UK; or London, ON in Canada (or indeed any one of the other numerous locations around the world that are called ‘London’.

Other classic ambiguous locations are Birmingham, Cleveland and Colchester (all UK/US location cross-overs); of course we can’t provide an exhaustive list here!

The real power of a worldwide search, however, is if you are the kind of person who regularly moves all around the world – the IT contractors among you, for example may well fit into this category.

The Options Dialog

Talking of Contractors, we also have four new options that you can use to modify your search. You’ll notice the spanner/wrench icon next to the ‘search’ button above. Clicking on this launches the new options dialog:

The emphasis here is functionality – not look and feel!

A quick run through of the different options:

Job Type: Select from Any (the original default), Permanent or Contract.
Per Page: The results from our web services are paged, previously you were fixed to 20 results per page, but now you can configure it in steps up to a maximum of 100 jobs per page.
Job Age: The previous search defaulted to pages posted in the last 7 days. Now you can select from 1 to 7 days; as well as the ‘Today Only’ option – which will include only jobs posted since midnight GMT today.
Distance: Allows you to specify the maximum distance a job is allowed to be from your specified location in order to be included in your search. There is no unit selection (miles/km) because it is interpreted differently according to the country in which you search. E.g. on a UK search the value is interpreted as miles, but on a US search it’s interpreted as kilometres.

What’s next?

The next iteration will see industry selection and ‘email me this job’ functionality which we have already released in our Windows Sidebar Gadget. We will endeavour to get this out as soon as possible, but we hope in the meantime that this will satiate your job-searching needs!

As always, keep coming back to this site, or subscribe to our Atom feed – as we have some very exciting developments on the way in the next few months!

Search for Jobs from your Google Desktop!

2009-07-27T11:20:13+01:00

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!

JobServe Labs - Articles in Google Desktop Job Search