14 DAY TRIAL // Working at Google's Mountain View headquarters can and is an all-around the year time occupier big time, so the engineers and everybody else there is thinking of the Holidays as a well deserved break from everything. And if they're not working, why should you stop?
Here's what they have offered as an alternative to whatever plans you had for the Holidays, or when a break in those plans occurs: you could start working on your very own Google Gadget and, thus, increase the amount of traffic for your application the easy way. How about creating the Gadget as a different view into your application? Or, what would you think about the Gadget you create being a stand alone app? Either way, they've provided you with a tutorial to get you started in case that's the way you want to go.
If you don't feel like working and forcing your little grey cells into creating something, interconnecting ideas and testing the Gadget over and over again, you could as easily read one of the many tutorials that they have created for building some more sophisticated apps. Or, if you're after the Christmas meal and you're too lazy for that too, you could check out the Demo Gallery that has working demo applications that you could see working. Or for that matter, you could always click the "View Source" link in any GME app, in order to see how it was built, as Paul McDonald with the Google Mashup editor team informs us.
The third option that they've decided to give the world of programmers out there is to watch a screencast out of the set of videos that they started creating. You could check it out as well, if you've really got nothing to do. Me? I'll be sure to shut down the PC and give somebody my keyboard to hide. It is Christmas after all.