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January 20, 2008

Editors for Creating iGoogle Themes

igThemer is a simple way to create iGoogle themes. This week, Google released an API for creating themes, but if you don't want to read the documentation and create the theme files, igThemer lets you select the colors and the necessary images, while previewing the theme on the same page.

igThemer doesn't let you create themes with multiple scenes, but it hosts your theme so you can share it with your friends or submit it to iGoogle's directory. Regardless of the way you create a theme, an easy way to preview it is to use this URL:

http://www.google.com/ig?skin=SKIN_URL
(replace SKIN_URL with the location of your theme's XML file)



An even cooler solution lets you edit the theme directly in iGoogle and see the changes in real-time. Just go to iGoogle, copy the code below and paste it in the address bar (you could also bookmark the script):

javascript:var s=document.createElement('script');s.id="igteid"; s.type="text/javascript";s.src= "http://igoogle-theme-editor.googlecode.com/svn/" +"trunk/iGoogleThemeEditor/dist/ige.js?lang=en&" +new Date().getTime(); document.body.appendChild(s);void(0);


{ The first screenshot is based on the photo Colourful life, licensed as Creative Commons by BlueSunFlower. }

7 comments:

  1. Nice find... I am definetly going to use it, as I failed to get it working while following the original documentation.

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  2. I started making something similar to the igThemer yesterday, but supports multiple scenes. It's far from being finished. If you are interested, you can take a look at it here.

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  3. I noticed this morning that the iGoogle theme directory is beginning to contain more of people's work. There are now 7 pages of themes to choose from. Sorry if this is old news. I just noticed.

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  4. Ummm... pardon my ignorance, but what do you do once you have the XML? Where do I go now?

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  5. where do i start? how do you make a theme? do i hav 2 look up pictures first?

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