iGoogle and the Teahouse Theme

December 11, 2008

I have been using Google’s application called iGoogle as the home page of my browser for a couple of years now. This service provides a single page which you can customize with your email inbox, your RSS feeds, weather, bookmarks, and a whole host of other items. Having all these items on a single page makes it much easier for me to keep track of them. My wife and I also use a third-party web application called Todoist, which you can just as easily add to iGoogle; we don’t even have to leave our start pages to add new tasks or mark them as completed. (We share an account so we can both see our shared tasks and assign them to each other.)

iGoogle has a large number of themes, allowing you to change how your iGoogle page looks. At first, there were no themes; everyone’s page looked like what’s now called the Classic theme. Today there are thousands of themes, but there were only six when they were first introduced. I first tried out Beach and Sweet Dreams back then, but they just didn’t feel right. On a whim I switched to Teahouse, and I haven’t looked back.

A fox is the main character, and he lives in a tea-house on the river. Every two hours the theme changes to show him performing a different activity. I expected it to be too cartoon-y and for me to get tired of it quickly, but I still absolutely love it! (I love foxes, especially foxes in fiction like Aesop’s fables and The Fox and the Hound, so I should not have been so surprised.) I have been using this theme for nearly two years now, and I haven’t felt the slightest need to change it.

One of my favorite things about this theme is how much my son loves it. He was born in March 2007, just days after the original six themes were released. Because I love foxes so much, “fox” was one of the first words he learned. (He is the only child I know who has a stuffed animal of a fox; why don’t they make more of these?) He quickly figured out that my computer monitor often had a fox on it, and he loves to sit in my lap and look at it. He now points at any computer screen and says, “Computer. Fox.” Many items in each of the scenes correspond to words he has learned, and looking at my iGoogle page has become practice for him on his vocabulary. Here’s a handful of the different scenes accompanied by the words he knows in each of them.

fox, house, tree, ladder, sun, tree, snake, water, fish