Google becoming more Mac friendly, encourages Mac development in 20% time
Google has long been a fan of Apple and its products, but it wasn’t until recently that it translated into useful development for the Mac platform. Mac use on the Google campus has reached about 30% (or approximately 6,000 of their 20,000 employees use Macs as their preferred platform). This means that those Mac lovers are using Google’s famous 20 percent time to develop applications for the platform they love.
You can see several of the applications under development at Google’s Mac Developer Playground. My personal favorite application from the list is a silly one: Statz. It lets you update your status into Skype, Adium and other programs all at the same time. Truly a tool for the lazy (or incredibly busy).
If Statz is too silly for you, maybe Vidnik is more your cup of tea. It lets you skip the middleman (or middle program, as it were) and record direct from your iSight to YouTube. It was already easy to upload videos from Mac to YouTube, and now this makes it even easier. Dangerously easy. You may want to put a bit of masking tape over the iSight at parties if you don’t want your shenanigans aired online for all of your friends (and bosses) to see…
Matt Asay speculates on an ideal future with a combined Google and Apple, but I can’t see that happening. That would actually be bad for both companies, I think. While they work well together on application development, it is their differences that make them strong, and the rest of us reap the benefits of that “separate but equally cool” mentality. Meanwhile, if you are looking for some great developing code – go check out the Mac Playground. You won’t be sorry.
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