It all started when checking my Twitter feed… there were rumblings of an interesting Google Doodle today.
Now, I’ve written before about my love of the Google Doodle – a unique regular item of changing their logo to celebrate key events. Usually, they look back at history. Today, they look forward in time.
As The Guardian website says:
For its 12th birthday, the Google logo shows off what programmers can do with a few lines of code, in the latest of its long line of attention-getting “doodles”. The logo on Google’s homepage is made out of a set of bouncing “balls” that swirl around the page in modern browsers such as its own Chrome, Firefox, Apple‘s Safari and some versions of Opera – but not in older versions of Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer (though the most recent version, IE8, does).
Google officially opened its doors – or rather door – 12 years ago in Menlo Park California. As the company history explains:
“On September 7, 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control, as it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation’s staff of three. The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub. It also provided a parking space for the first employee hired by the new company: Craig Silverstein, now Google’s director of technology.
“Already Google.com, still in beta, was answering 10,000 search queries each day. The press began to take notice of the upstart website with the relevant search results, and articles extolling Google appeared in USA TODAY and Le Monde. That December, PC Magazine named Google one of its Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998. Google was moving up in the world”
The Guardian continues:
But rather than looking back, Google’s doodle today looks ahead to the next version of the computer code that delineates the web. The doodle actually consists of lots of pieces of a web page, each using a modern form of web coding called CSS3 – “Cascading Style Sheet” elements. Each circle is actually an element called a “div” – an element into which the page is divided – which contains an instruction in its associated piece of CSS3 to make it circular rather than square or rectangular. The code also contains instructions so that if the cursor is moved near to any of the “bubbles”, they try to move away.
I think it’s rather fabulous and a good way to show what can be done. Roll on the future!
[via The Guardian and Twitter]
