Hi All,

I have fantastic news. We have a new owner of the Customize Talk website! I have been going through a number of applicants and selected Sudar M as being the most suitable person. He is now the official owner of the website.

I'd like to close what could be my last news post with a final word of thanks to my closest friends on the site. Vikke and Lucky, I appreciate your final comments. We have done a lot of work together and I hope to stay friends whenever we are on Google Talk or alike. Thankyou to Wumpus for making the website possible in the first place, and thankyou to all my forum friends, Excessive, Rapster and others. I'll talk to you all over time. :)

Cheers, your former webmaster,
mEo

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My appologies for this news I am about to bring. We have certainally had a lot over the years, but over the last 2, there has not been much happening on the Google Talk front. Apart from the 'Labs' edition, the application has not been updated for years, not months. This is not an attack on Google - other products are far more available and I appreciate these instead.

It is with regret that I have to announce the shutdown of customizetalk.com.

Due to the inactivity of Google Talk, I am going to be closing down this website, as I am not able to manage the costs involved.

If anyone would be interested in continuing this website under their own control, please be in contact with me through m i k es e n a [at] gmail. I will be closing the website down in about a week if I have not heard from a suitable candidate.

Thankyou for everyone who has been a part of the community here.
Thankyou to Wumpus, who initiated this site and built the community.
Thanks to Lucky and Vikke - I've worked with both of you closely in the past, I hope we can still stay in contact.
Thanks to all the others on the forums - you know who I'm talking to. You guys have made the forums great and given a lot of support to the people who stumble upon us.

I hope to hear from you all at another point in the future!

Thankyou,
mEo
(Site Administrator)

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STOP! Now don't get your hopes up. This is a web application. Not a native application. You can't do much with it besides chatting.

So yeah, you can try it yourself by going to this address in Safari: http://www.google.com/talk



Let's hope there will be something better after the App Store launches.

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Due to difficulties with the payment of the site, customizetalk.com might be down for a couple of days.

Do not fear however, Customizetalk will be back up again, if this does in fact occur, very shortly afterwards!

We appologise for any inconvinience this may cause.

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A new client has been released today to Google Labs, for testing and feedback purposes. This is not a final product, and still contains quite a lot of bugs (please report all bugs you find to Google using the Feedback-button). This client basically allows you to run the Google Talk flash gadget as a window in Windows XP and Vista, but it also offers notifications like the old desktop client. :)

Update 1:
Google Talk now requires an installation, something the old client did automatically when you ran the program. This is due to the fact that there's a new version system, making it easy to separate between different versions.

Instead of installing it to the Program Files-folder like the old client used to, it now installs it to these folders depending on your operative system:
XP: <Drive>\Documents and Settings\<User>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk, Labs Edition\
Vista: <Drive>\Users\<User>\AppData\Google\Google Talk, Labs Edition\
<Drive> should be replaced with the drive where Windows is installed (very often C:\).
<User> should be replaced with the current user signed into Windows (probably your name).

Update 2:
The client is now using HTML, JavaScript and CSS to render all its windows, and stuff. This means it's skinable for us, and we can also make huge modifications. It's using the normal flash gadget to do the "hard work" though. :(
The rendering engine is webkit (the Safari rendering engine) instead of Internet Explorer. This means that it's going to be easy to port to other platforms like Mac OSX and hopefully Linux as well.

You can find all the important files in a version-folder inside the Google Talk installation folder (see above). It also contains DLL's (core.dll for instance) which are loaded dynamically by the EXE, that's probably the only thing the EXE does. I'll reverse engineer these routines later, so I'll be back with more information in a while.

By putting a simple HTML link I got it to load CustomizeTalk.com:

I hope we can get this client really customized with these great possibilities! :)

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Now this is a great way to start the week! Google OS has a story that will make us all happy:

Quote:

Let's hope it won't take another year for that to happen! :P

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Here's a short list of a few emoticons you didn't know about. Some of them work only in the new Gmail.



Here you can see all the emoticons supported by Gmail chat!

[via Google OS]

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Today Google introduced a new Google Talk feature that lets visitors to a web site chat with the owner. Here's how it looks:



When they visit your site, they'll see a badge like the one above showing your online status (available, busy, offline) and, if you're available, they can just click and start chatting. Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don't need to download anything. It opens in a new window so they can keep chatting with you even if they browse to other pages.

You can add this to any website that allows you to have HTML inside. So this should work on most social networks, blogs and on personal websites such as ones hosted at Google Pages.

Create your own right here!

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