Doing the Monster Mash....

Last Friday I came across the Google Mashup Editor, after glancing at the tour I decided to request an invite hoping to be lucky enough to try it out early on in the game. I was pleased to find this morning in my mail box an acceptance onto the beta. So today i decided to have a quick play and get to grips with it. I have to say after logging in I was quite impressed. Your presented with the all too familiar "Google blue" styling as I have named it and a nice ajax'd interface which is clear and easy to use.

Initial Meanderings

The first thing i decided to was to open one of the sample projects, this gave me the chance to see how google's tags worked and how it all fits together. The editor itself is a nice online editor, line numbers, basic highlighting, save etc. My only bad comment so far is that some times when editing the editor just pauses and then catches up. I'm hoping this is just a beta issue and gets ironed out, nothing worse than typing away and then noticing you have lost a couple of lines/ Any how, after playing with the various sample projects I decided to start tinking, as I was in a rush earlier I decided to only attempt to alter the Task List project to something more suitable for my needs. My aim was to play with some rendering, remove some fields and add another so that I could organise my tasks for the day and have a task list for each project I'm working on. Needless to say this simple task was very easy, and within 20 mins I had sussed out how it all worked and how i could import style sheets, JS etc. I should mention at this point that when you test your mashup project, the editor compiles your code to check for glaringly obvious mistakes and then gives you a nice preview. Thia quick and simple step is nice and compiling doesn't seem to take any more time than saving, not in my simple testing anyway. I did spot another annoyance while testing and compiling however. I assumed, which i think is a natural assumption, that when you compile and test that your project is saved. Much like Visual Studio. However sadly this is not the case :( Guess who tested his changes and quit the app by mistake only to find they weren't saved. :( :( I also had a quick gander at the very nice taglist feature. This list all of the tags and how they can be used. It's good to see Google haven't let us down with documentation, especially when you look at the entire help section.

Putting my MashUp Out There

My next step invloved publishing my simple mashup to the world. This was exceptionally easy -> Publish. You even get to choose a name for the url. .googlemashups.com Very nice. And that really was it, once you ok the domain the mashup publishes and you can go tell all your mates about how awesome your mashup is. Whats also good is how simple it is to republish your project or if you find you have published a project with a glaringly obvious error in it you can "unplubilsh it". Sweet.

Rounding it all up

Overall so far my experience with Google Mashup Editor, all though very much early days, has been good. Apart from the two niggles I noticed earlier I haven't found any major issues and I'm looking forward to playing with it more and using multiple feeds with it. In my eyes I see Google Mashup Editor as a more programmatic version of Yahoo! Pipes. Pipes for me so far has been a bit of a let down as I havn't really been able to do alot with it, I'm hoping that ill find Google Mashup Editor more useful, and you never know I may even write myself a widget for my Google Sidebar ;) If you really feel the need to look at my basic mashup then take a trip to the New Mind Project Task Manager