Google Usability

2 simple things are needed:

1. Allow for customization of the top-level menu. Some items, like Reader, are buried in the drop down and it would be helpful if these could be moved or reordered.
2. Add Notebook as an available item in the top level menu.

Groovy and Google Notebook

I started learning Groovy in the past few days. So far I am wondering why I waited so long to start learning it. I like the shorthand style and the ability to get tasks that are a pain in Java done quickly. These are obvious things to like certainly since they are objectives of the language.

Anyhow, I needed something to do with the language so I chose to write a simple script to download a list of public notebooks from Google Notebook and then process the first one in the list. Here are some observations on the process.

It was not immediately obvious to me how to obtain my Google userid that the documentation mentions. I discovered after a bit of frustration that it is a large numeric value that is passed no the query string and is not the userid that one logs in with. This didn’t jump out at me from the documentation.

I used Eclipse to write my script and boy did I miss several things that the plugin lacks: code auto formatting and a debugger. Even though the script I wrote is trivial a debugger would be a nice tool in learning Groovy. Maybe one of the other IDE’s has one for Groovy?

Groovy still awkward to me after living the structurd life of a Java programmer for so many years. The corner-cutting takes some getting used to. The missing ;’s can feel like nails on a chalkbaord.


import com.google.gdata.client.*;
import com.google.gdata.data.*;
def myId = 'big number from google url'
def urlUser = "http://www.google.com/notebook/feeds/$myId"
URL feedUrl = new URL(urlUser);

GoogleService googleService = new GoogleService("notebook", "alex sample");

/**
* request the feed
*/
Feed myFeed = googleService.getFeed(feedUrl, Feed.class);

print 'notebook name: '
println myFeed.title.plainText;

List l = myFeed.entries;

println "public notebook's: "
for (Entry e in l) {


print e.title.plainText;

URL notebookUrl = new URL(e.id)

Feed notebookFeed = googleService.getFeed(notebookUrl, Feed.class);
/* process the feed */

}

Google Notebook + Gears

Since moving mostly to a Mac for software development, one piece of software on Windows that I have been unable to find a replacement for is Microsoft OneNote. I use OneNote as a repository for notes and coding snippets that I find useful, want to try out, or just simply want to remember for some rainy day. Its beauty is in its simplicity as a quick note taking tool. I can paste something in it when I am in a hurry and then return and file it later when I have time. Certainly there are similar tools on the Mac but I simply haven’t broken my links with OneNote yet.

I had not paid much attention to Google Notebook until a few days ago. The Firefox browser plugin is brilliant. Now all the tool needs to be a complete replacement is offline support through Gears. I’m sure this will be soon. When the offline support is added, it becomes more than a replacement for OneNote for me. It becomes a useful note repository that isn’t tied to a single machine.  After the offline support a desktop client and a mobile client would certainly follow.