Googleman

Marge: 'Homer! There's someone here who can help you...' Homer: 'Is it Batman?' Marge: 'No, he's a scientist.' Homer: 'Batman's a scientist?!' Marge: 'It's not Batman!'Googleman is a fun and pointless application for launching Google.com in the style of the Batman 60s TV show, complete with spinning Google logo and sound effects. Now when a friend or co-worker says “To Google!” you can open your favourite search engine in style.

Launch Google either from the Googleman tray icon or by hitting the Windows+G hotkey.

Download Googleman

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Technical Stuff

Googleman is my first WPF application and it is extremely simple. The Batman 60s splash screen effect is achieved by launching a fullscreen window with two images. The background image is a screenshot of the desktop with a rotate animation applied to it. The logo zoom is done using a scale animation. Once the splash screen animation is complete the window hides itself and launches Google.com.

Kind of ruins the magic when you know how it works.

Background

We have been discussing patterns a fair bit at work so I wrote Googleman using the MVP pattern. I am working on an ASP.NET MVC website at the moment and Googleman was so I could understand the differences between the two patterns. Hopefully I have gotten it right…

Thanks to JD for help with testing and Tokes for insights into MVP.

Disclaimer

Google is serious business. Googleman is not a toy and should only be used in serious business situations. Or for lulz.

 

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