Last week, I created and released G+7 - a Windows 7/Vista desktop gadget that displays live stream of updates from your Google+ friends.
The implementation was a bit tricky, first of all because of the face that Google+ does not offer any sort of official API. So I had to resort to reverse engineering Ajax calls made by Google+ web page to fetch posts. Second complication was caused by the face that Windows desktop gadgets are pretty much pure javascript, and because of that they have trouble creating and using authentication cookies that Google uses - like I said, there is no API available to authenticate you programmatically to Google+, so some hacks had to be made, some .NET code used to retrieve cookies as well as fetching update streams.
All of this makes G+7 a bit of a hack job.
But anyway - I suppose it is quite useful to some people, as I have been seeing quite a lot of downloads over the weekend.
I am planning some additional fucntionality in the future:
- posting comments to messages
- sharing posts
- +1 button
Give it a try
Here are some screenshots
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