Google Mac Apps You May NOT Know About

You probably have installed or are aware of Mac software from Google like Google Desktop and Picasa Web Albums Uploader. Google's best known Mac apps are found at...

http://www.google.com/mac

This where you can also find Notifier for the Mac, Toolbar for Firefox, Google Earth, and SketchUp. And, don't overlook the Search Mac Sites button that focuses your search on all things Mac.

There is, however, another collection of Google built Mac software called the Google Mac Developer Playground which is part of Google Code. This houses Google developed Mac tools and demos such as Visigami, AppMenuBoy, Statz, and MacFUSE. Keep an eye on the Google Mac Blog (the Google Mac Team's blog) for announcements and updates related to both the mainstream Mac apps in the Google Mac software downloads page as well as the lesser known tools in the Google Mac Developer Playground. Visigami is the most recent Mac app announced by the Google Mac Team. It searches for and displays images from the web, Picasa, and Flickr and displays them in an animated fashion on the screen. There is also a screen saver component. However, from what I see, it should only be used with single display Macs. On a dual-screen system, the screen saver only displayed images on the main monitor and drove the second display to a bright white.

Other end-user friendly applications from the Playground include AppMenuBoy and Statz. AppMenuBoy brings back hierarchical menus to the Leopard dock. Statz lets you simultaneouly change status information across various net-presence services such as iChat, Skype, Tumblr, and Twitter.

Some Google Playground tools are not so end-user (non-programmer) friendly though. One example that comes to mind is the powerful MacFUSE that implements FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) for the Mac. This is, however, a third-party contributed Open Source software in Google Code called MacFusion that places an end-user friendly graphical wrapper around MacFUSE to make it more accessible.

You can find other Mac related projects on Google Code contributed by people/teams other than the Google Mac Team too. Check out this list (linked in the previous sentence) for other Open Sourced software for the Mac.