Google adds open source updater, JavaScript art apps

View this article at: http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/09/30/java.art.app.and.updater/

Tuesday, Sep 30, 2008 12:30am

Google adds open source updater, JavaScript art apps

Google on Monday unveiled a new open source app called Update Engine to update its various Mac products, as well as Top Draw, a drawing application that constructs images based on JavaScript-based text files. Update Engine not only allows users to update their Google-designed Mac apps, preference panes, and screen savers, but also arbitrary files and root-level kernel extensions. Its open source nature also allows third party developers to adapt Update Engine for their own products.

Developers are able to use Update Engine with sampled command-line programs, which Google calls EngineRunner, but also provides more thorough control through the included Objective-C API.

Top Draw offers users the ability to run JavaScript-like text files through a safe sandbox environment, drawing a picture based on the contents of the file using Apple's Quartz and CoreImage rendering engines. In addition to HTML canvas tag commands, Google includes support for particle systems, plasma clouds, random noise, multi-layer compositing, and other features.