Google Chrome goes psychedelic
dan tynan on Mar 20 2009 at 10:58 am | Filed under: Computerworld, Culture Crash, Google
Google is touting the uber-grooviness of its technology by urging Javascript mavens to mash it up, and is showing off the results on its Chrome Experiments page. Some of them are pretty impressive.
A nifty app called Google Gravity takes the Google home page and causes the search window and all other page elements to cascade to the bottom of the screen like ice sheets tumbling off a glacier. Here’s a good April Fool’s Day trick to play on someone: Change their home page to the Google Gravity app without telling them, then watch what happens when they load their browser. Tell them their computer has caught the Yadslooflirpa.32 virus, and offer to fix it for $50.
There’s Ball Pool (above): Open the browser window, hold down your mouse button, and dozens of psychadelic multicolored balls come tumbling out of your cursor to fill the browser window. And…. that’s about it. (Consumption of brain altering chemicals may be advised.) And then Browser Ball, in which a red and white beach ball can be made to bounce between overlapping browser windows.
Interestingly, Gravity, Pool, and Browser Ball all work just fine in Firefox 3.07. So much for showing off the innate grooviness of Chrome.
Silly stuff? You bet. But it shows just how hard these companies are working to best each other – a kind of competition can only be good for users in the long run.
You can read the rest of this post (actually, the first part) over at Computerworld’s Culture Crash blog. Who knows, you may be the only one there.
