Tuesday, October 30, 2007

iGoogle Themes Directory Coming Soon?
By Tony Ruscoe

In March, seven iGoogle themes were released; Classic, Beach, Bus Stop, City Scape, Sweet Dreams, Tea House and Seasonal Scape, which was later renamed to Winter Scape. Around one month later, the Winter Scape theme was replaced with Spring Scape but no more official themes have been added since then. (Some people have made their own gadgets to allow customized skins though.)

Now, Garett Rogers is pondering whether third party iGoogle themes are coming soon after seeing the text “Theme created by” in the footer of an iGoogle homepage.

I’m seeing some extra information in the theme XML files which wasn’t there when the themes were released. Here’s a snippet from the Beach XML file:

<author>Google</author>
<title>Beach</title>
<description>It’s okay if vacation isn’t coming up soon. Bring the beach right to your iGoogle homepage and watch the colors reflecting on the water change as the day goes by. It’s almost as good as the real thing.</description>
<author_affiliation>Google</author_affiliation>
<author_location>Mountain View, CA</author_location>

I’m not sure how long these details have been included, but they’re pretty pointless if they’re not going to be displayed anywhere for users to read, and it looks like the type of information that would be included in a directory.

So, I guess you should keep your eyes peeled for a third party iGoogle theme directory full of custom themes to brighten up your Google home page. I wonder if it will have all the features Philipp suggested...

iGoogle Themes Directory ... by Tony Ruscoe | Comments (16)

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