In my last post I discussed the new support which allows running Qliklets (QlikView powered widgets) in iGoogle. In this post I will illustrate how easy this then makes it to run the same Qliklets on the desktop using Google Desktop and the simple steps necessary to achieve this.
Step 1
The first thing of course is to make you have downloaded and installed Google Desktop, this can be obtained from here. You can also read more about the various features provided by Google Desktop here. For our purposes we are interested in the feature of running Google Gadgets on the Desktop 'out of browser'.
Step 2
Once you have Google Desktop installed and running you should find a new icon in your status bar through which you can add new gadgets to your Google Desktop as shown below.
Step 3
Once you have clicked this you will be presented with the following interface:
At present the Gadgets are not in the Gadget catalogues, so we simply copy and paste the URL of the gadget definition into the search bar. If you would like to try this yourself you can select from one of the following:
For this post I will use the first. Simply copy the url from the middle column in the above table and paste it into the 'Search gadgets' box as shown below:
Google Desktop quickly finds the Gadget and presents it in the results.
Step 4
Now click the 'Add' button:
And OK the confirmation:
Step 5
If Google Desktop has added the Gadget into the side bar you may need to just 'undock' it so that it is floating over the main desktop and displays properly - you might also need to resize it slightly the first time it's used.
We haven't looked yet into making the Gadgets render properly in the 'side bar'. It seems that the area would be too small anyway to provide any useful functionality for the Qliklets that we have been working on so far, but it's something we will investigate further if necessary.
