Mature Models on the Playground

Hey, Mac users, Google has a new gift for you! The Mac team working at the Mountain View company has released the Mac Developer Playground, "a website where the Mac community can look for new and interesting open source projects and demos from our Mac team," as Amit Singh, Engineering Manager, and Karen Grünberg, Product Manager, explained on the blog.

In fact, the Playground is a nice source of open source (which means they are available to ALL the users) projects built in the Googlers' free time, many of them being really useful for some of the Apple customers. "You'll find a variety of projects that we work on in our 20% time, like CoverStory, as well as our more mature open source projects such as MacFUSE and the GData libraries," they added.

Let's take for example Statz. This is a nice utility, which allows you to "change you status everywhere at once." It supports several Mac IM applications, so in case you're one of those users chatting on several networks, it might really help you expressing your mood. "Statz lets you modify your status across apps like Adium, iChat, Skype, and Colloquy. Plug-ins for some of your other favorite services coming soon. By using custom sources you can create very flexbile statuses and have them apply to different services," it is mentioned on the official page of the project.

What's very interesting is that all these projects are designed by the folks working at the Mountain View company, so you'll have all their ideas listed on websites. In case you didn't know, all the Google employee have 20 percent of the work time addressed to individual projects, many of the utilities published on the Playground being built during this time.

If you want to visit the Google Mac Developer Playground, you can click on this link and browse among the numerous demos already published on the page.