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Thursday, October 2, 2008

Google engineers add two projects to Google Mac Playground

By Chris Foresman

Top Draw example from Google.
Top Draw example from Google

Those Googlers and their 20 percent time—always coming up with interesting software tidbits. The better ones for Mac users are posted to the Google Mac Playground, and there are two recent additions: Top Draw and Update Engine.

Top Draw is an algorithm-based drawing program; a sort of a turbo-charged, alcohol-fueled funny car version of Logo for the modern age. It uses simple scripts written in a JavaScript-based syntax and leverages CoreImage and Quartz rendering to make limitless images. "In addition to the drawing commands that are supported by the HTML canvas tag, there is support for particle systems, plasma clouds, random noise, multi-layer compositing and much more," writes Daniel Waylonis of the Google Mac Team. In addition to a viewer app, it includes a screensaver module so you can create your own mesmerizing screensaver. Though it is somewhat of a toy, it could be used to learn or buff up on programming skills, or generate some fantastic digital art.

Update Engine, on the other hand, is entirely different. It is designed as a framework for developers to add auto-updating features to their applications. Though Sparkle is already a popular framework for doing this in Cocoa-based apps, Greg Miller from the Update Engine Team notes that Update Engine was design for much more complex update tasks than Sparkle. Even Sparkle developer Andy Matuschak himself admitted, "From what I've seen, the Update Engine is way better engineered and is a lot more flexible [than Sparkle]," though both Miller and Matuschak feel that Sparkle is a good choice for more straightforward updating. And really, what developer would complain about having two well-made frameworks to choose from to add auto-update functionality?

Both Top Draw and Update Engine have source code as well as compiled binaries available from Google Code, so if you have a hankering for either, give them a download. As with all Google Playground software, they are absolutely free.

Original here

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