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November 26, 2007

Rule-Based iGoogle Themes

While iGoogle already offers 11 themes to customize the homepage, there's no option to create your own theme. Custom iGoogle Skins is an inline gadget that lets you choose between more than 70 user-created themes (some of them are illustrated in this gallery) or create a custom theme.

An interesting new feature from the latest version of the gadget adds rules for displaying themes: you can choose to show a theme only when it rains, on a certain day of the week or if your IP matches a certain value. Google's themes are already rule-based, but you can't switch between them automatically. For example, this gadget lets you have different themes for a tab if you load iGoogle at home or at work (assuming the IP addresses are static).

Some interesting personalization rules for the feature could include changing the theme depending on your mood, your Google Talk status, your Google Calendar agenda the tab's title or the latest news.


Note: you'll have to add the gadget to every tab you want to have a custom theme.

{ Thanks, Greg. }

7 comments:

  1. quite cool gadget.
    but unfortunately, i didn't find a way to use the google themes, too...

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  2. There's an option to add Google's themes: Edit Settings > Skin choice > Select "Show custom and official skins".

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  3. It didn't work for me. In firefox, the page now takes eternally to load and even though i removed it, it appeared again whenever i refreshed the browser or even restarted the browser. Tried it on IE and at least it shows up but it hid all the minimize-close buttons on all gadgets including itself.

    There're still bugs with it.

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  4. Neat idea but is buggier than ab ant hill. Especially with FireFox

    Too bad.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Cool, but such a waste of time.

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  6. Extremely buggy. I really would not recommend this gadget, esp. if you're running firefox. Sometimes it shows up, sometimes it doesn't...The delete button doesn't work, I had to completely nuke one of my tabs to get rid of it.

    ReplyDelete