The current version of Kerika uses an embedded Google Docs Gadget, that’s part of the Sidebar within the application. There’s no polite way to describe this software, which comes in four different flavors from the mighty Google itself; let’s just say that the technical term for it is “p.o.s. software”.

A Google Docs Gadget is supposed to be something that you can easily embed within a website or application: it supposed to provide easy, direct access to your Google Docs from within your site or Web App. There are at least four official Google Docs Gadgets out there:

• There’s this one from “Claudia C. and Ted C.“, both employees at Google – as you can easily see by viewing the XML code for this Gadget. It doesn’t work, which probably explains why Claudia and Ted are coy about revealing their last names. And when we say it doesn’t work, we don’t mean that it has some subtle bugs that are unlikely to surface for most users: just visit this Gadget, at Google’s own official website, and try setting the number of documents to show in the list. It doesn’t work.
  
• Here’s another one: presumably a later one than the first, since it’s authorship is attributed to “Claudia C. and Ted C. Modified by Gordon Bunker”. We don’t know who Mr. Bunker is, but he couldn’t get Claudia and Ted’s Gadget to work properly either.
• Here’s a third one: also the work of Claudia C and Ted C. This one is hilariously broken: just visit the link that says “Add to your home page” and you see the helpful message “Error parsing module spec: Not a properly formatted file missing xml header”. So, here we have an example of two Google employees, hosting an official Google Gadget, on Google’s own website, that is completely broken…
• Finally, we have this one, attributed to “Claudia C., Ted C., and Sam B.”. Sam, like Claudia and Ted, found it wiser not to disclose his last name given he somehow managed to reduce the utility of the original Gadget.

So, there you have it: four different, official versions of the embeddable Google Docs Gadget, none of which work… The situation became untenable for us because with the latest version of Google’s Chrome browser, the drag-and-drop function stopped working altogether. No small irony here, that Google’s own browser doesn’t work with their own Gadgets, when Firefox’s drag-and-drop continues to work.

We can’t fix these Gadgets because they were built by Google employees; instead, we are building our own replacement for this Gadget which we expect to release this weekend. It’s simple, functional and reliable. It will let you perform a search across all your Google Docs, and drag-and-drop results from this search straight onto your Kerika pages. And, it will work on all browsers.