Ian Lewis' Blog

A couple of days ago Google released some new themes for iGoogle. They also mentioned that they have a new API for creating themes for iGoogle and that anyone can create themes. This is a bit of a misnomer because you can basically create a theme using the API and test it using the testing interface but it won't be added to iGoogle unless it's good and you did you homework and used the API properly.

I'm partial to the John Maeda "Simple is Complex" theme. He's pretty well known. I saw his talk on Ted (which is full of inspiring talks. PLEASE check it out) and I like his work, though some of his work seems a bit trendy and he did come of as a bit of an unorganized speaker (not that I have anything on him though ). He also needs to fix his javascript so it works in Firefox (click the dropdown).

I also liked the Yves Behar's "Earth-light" theme. Though it seemed to not work properly for me in Japan. It's supposed to show you where the sun is but strangely it says that it should be high noon when it's 7:00 at night here in Japan (check the bottom right corner in the screenshot). It almost seemed like it was showing the sun as if I was in California! Maybe it's because the author and the Google headquarters are both there? Didn't they bother to have someone test it in another timezone?