Take a step back in time to use Google in your command line interface. GoogleCL “streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs.” Aside from Blogger, Calendar, and Docs, it also provides CLI access to your Google Contacts, Picasa, and YouTube. Whether you’re in it for the sheer joy of feeling like it’s 1984 again or for the ease of doing a load of tasks in a batch or even incorporating it into your scripts for uber functionality and friendliness with your other apps, this nifty little program is for you. The app is native to Linux, but Mac and Windows users can use it with a bit of fenangling– all you’ll need is Python 2.5 or 2.6, and Windows users will need to add Cygwin to the mix.
Great news! Finally I don’t have to type the whole email address in mutt! Gonna make a super-script to do it for me, now!
cygwin for win32 has the worst installer ever.
gg installing svn by default, but not a text editor (vi at least, please)
Edited 2010-06-19 01:33 UTC
Not only that, but it’s slow as snot. I don’t have fond memories of using it in the past.
Sure, but don’t you think that trying to make Windows behave like Unix without being Unix-compatible at the core is a broken approach to begin with ?
If I absolutely needed an Unix shell on windows, I think I’d use virtualization and shared directories like my father does when he uses Office 2007 on OSX (because, let’s face it, Office for OSX’s UI is crap)
Edited 2010-06-19 05:33 UTC
As slow as the cygwin installer is, its faster than installing a virtual machine, takes up less spaces, and has lower resource usage.
What the hell does all this cygwin crap have to do with a python app? The gdata libraries is uses are python also.
Edited 2010-06-19 06:26 UTC
I also don’t understand the reference to Cygwin.
The windows installation steps don’t refer Cygwin at all.
http://publicint.blogspot.com/2010/06/setup-googlecl-on-winxp.html
So when Google makes a Windows-native app (Google Earth, Picasa) and tell Linux users to run it in wine (even providing wine with patches to help do so), they get blasted for not supporting Linux.
Now, they write a Linux-native app, which requires cygwin in Windows to run it, and there are complaints that there should be a native Windows version. And it’s a CLI app at that.
If you want to use a command line, just use Linux/BSD itself, either directly or in a virtual machine with shared folders enabled as other people mentioned. If you want to use a GUI, that’s where you should be using Windows. Why whine about the lack of a native CLI version on an OS whose CLI has always been a joke in the first place, and has always taken the backseat with childlock doors while the GUI has been the driver for decades?
And yes… I know Google Earth is now native to Linux, in case anyone wants to try to “correct” me. But it originally wasn’t.
Maybe Microsoft should stop treating the CLI like a complete joke (even with PowerShell, it’s still disappointing) and other companies will follow suit.
It’s called a crappy port. There are lots of these. Their users are always angry because they feel like they are under-estimated.
With PowerShell (2.0), you (or Google) could implement this using the New-WebServiceProxy cmdlet and have a lot of work done for you.
Calling web services from the cmdline is easy.
From moondevel’s link, I was wondering about running this in IronPython, but there’s a .NET library available for the GData API, so it should be pretty easy to implement this as a console app in any .NET language.
http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/articles/dotnet_client_lib.html
C# Example
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CategoryView.aspx?category=XML&page=2
PowerShell Example
http://dougfinke.com/blog/index.php/2009/02/22/powershell-get-googl…
For PowerShell, you can just load the dlls interactively and use the API directly, or build a GoogleCL-like facade, preferably deviating to take advantage of PowerShell’s OM rather than doing a direct copy.
Plus, Cygwin is far more integrated with Windows than Linux running in a virtual machine. In particular, it allows to run both Windows and Unix programs and to plug them together using the usual Unix facilities.
And that’s supposed to make it “the worst installer ever”?!?
Sure, it’s UI isn’t great, but it does the job. It recently sprouted a search box to make it easier to find packages, and command line options that allow to use it without the UI.
Svn is not installed by default btw, nor is vi, because if they were, too many would complain about “bloat”. The idea is to provide only what’s needed to install packages and run a shell, and let the user decide what else they need.
Cygwin is a hack of making non POSIX compliant Windows system bet somewhat compliant. So no wonder it’s not good.
There is many people that is still using the console as the main UI. In my case the only applications I use is a web browser, a pdf viewer and xterms glued together with dwm.
It’s about what the vast majority uses. I still use a 4 kg bakelite copper phone, but that doesn’t make I very 2010.
(I too use a CLI for the majority of my work)
I just installed setup.py with python then made batch to call “..\src\google” through python and works like charm
no need for cygwin
Edited 2010-06-19 09:19 UTC
OSAlert seems to be lowering the quality of the submitted stories.
yeah, maybe if you want to be really CLI, so you install cygwin, then python inside cygwin (not regular python windows bundle) and then go play in your CLI
This is awesome on top of awesome.
Great news.
I figure this will just be another tally in the “leets” vs. “noobs” dichotomy. As if the “leets” needed yet another reason to claim they don’t understand GUIs.
Yes, I do believe CLI vs. GUI is a dichotomy, and one that is still very much dividing users– the technical from the intuitive or some snot like that.
I think that actually, defining GUI as intrinsically better than CLI or CLI as intrinsically better than GUI is deceptive at best.
The benefits of GUI are now well-known. It is discoverable, it allows a higher information density, it allows drawing, editing video, and the like…
The benefits of CLI are well-known too. It is batch-friendly, it is fast for knowledgeable peoples, it is lightweight enough to be streamed over a network (let’s face it, remote desktop is too laggy to be a seamless experience. Since CLI is intrinsically laggy, on the other hand, the issue does not exist). Some tasks, like scientific calculation or programming, are intrinsically command line. Graphic form exist, but they just don’t work (see LabView)
In some cases, CLI is just better. In other cases, GUI is just better. In my opinion, it’s a matter of choosing the right tool for each job. But still, there are some people who want to fight about what is best, neglecting that both must coexist because some GUI tasks cannot be done in CLI and the reverse sentence is just as true.
Indeed. It’s unfortunate not many make such a distinction, however, and suggest that CLI is more suited to the power users, and GUI is more for tech illiterates.
I suppose it would be different if Microsoft hadn’t marginalized DOS and the CLI so much over time, but… yeah.
Only Microsoft?! Before MacOS X, there was also no CLI available on Macs by default.
On top of each forum where this happens, there should be a warning reminding of
-Photoshop
-SolidWorks/CATIA/AutoCAD
-3DSMax/Blender
-Origin (I think this one has been voluntarily obfuscated to make switching to competiting software unnecessarily painful. Everything looks like it’s voluntarily handled differently just for the sake of being handled differently)
-LabView
The last one, especially, is an indicative example of what happens when people put a GUI on top of a CLI concept and think that it will magically make it more easy to use…
While [barely] on the topic of Google CLI tools, this CLI-esque version of Google Search has been around for a while: http://www.goosh.org
Not to mention I’m pretty sure there was an OSAlert article for it, too.
Gizmodo recently announced that a model phone for the next generation of iPhone is lost by an iPhone engineer. M003 8 inch are the NO.1 in the List of Most Wanted Must-Haves in 2009 This news once attracts the passionate concern of the netizens. You Know What? I Bought a Perfect N900 for My Mother at a Very Low Price In view of Apple’s consistent strategy for public relations, it was not done by Apple consciously. Megan Fox Shows up in Famous TV80 Gizmodo believed that only if Apple revolutionized the previous public relations strategy can it be possible to intentionally leak the next generation iPhone. Apple has the strongest confidentiality among consuming production companies in past 10 years. Apple behaves like a defence contractor on the terms of information disclosure, while many companies have already began to use blogs and Offcial Twitter accounts.http://www.fashioniphone.com/“>iphone