If you’re a user of iGoogle, Google’s interactive and customizable homepage, then you may have noticed several new themes available to you. If you’ve looked at the themes you probably noticed that there aren’t very many themes available.

Being the perfectionist that I am, I wanted my iGoogle page to look a certain way and became frustrated that, due to the lack of themes available, I was unable to achieve that look. So I attempted to google up a theme that would satisfy me.

To my surprise there was only one Google Gadget that attempted to solve my quandary. This gadget was created by BonstioNet and while it was a great idea and initially appeared to solve my problem, it had a few problems. First, it is an inline gadget – a type of gadget that has access to the entire DOM of iGoogle. These type of gadgets show a security alert to users and they have since been deprecated by Google. Second, since it is a gadget, it doesn’t actually theme or skin the page until it is fully loaded. The reality of my experience with this gadget was that I would initially see the iGoogle page with its default theme, followed shortly thereafter with my own selected skin. This annoyance turned out to be the deal breaker for me.

At that point I decided I would see what I could do to create my own theme that didn’t have any of the aforementioned problems. After my initial research I quickly realized that BonstioNet had created the best possible solution utilizing the tools that Google had provided. Since I was unable to improve on what they had done I looked at simply using my local proxy server (Proxomitron) to replace iGoogle’s CSS file with my own. This solution worked perfectly and the results were exactly what I wanted – with one exception. This solution does not follow me everywhere, regardless of which computer I’m using.

So, as you can see, I was unable to solve my problem perfectly, and that didn’t sit well with me. During my research I picked up on a few things that led me to believe Google was deprecating inline gadgets partly because they were going to provide their own API for theming. I hadn’t actually read that anywhere, but I couldn’t believe Google would take away skinning from people and not replace it with their own solution.

On Wednesday, January 16, 2007, Google officially announced the iGoogle Themes API. With this API developers can finally create themes in a Google supported way. Basically a developer needs to create an XML file following the template provided by Google.

I created my first theme called SimplePackers and it turned out to be an incredibly simple task. You just need to specify a centered header image and tiled background along. Doing that along with specifying a few font color attributes yields an incredibly different looking iGoogle page.

The iGoogle Themes API appears to be an early release as evidenced by the testing mode not working as well as the lack of several attributes like background colors and fonts. Luckily there was a workaround for the testing mode problem and I expect Google will shortly updated the API to include several more customizable attributes.

Google has finally provided a tool for developers to customize the look of iGoogle. Like all API’s, this one is sure to grow and improve over time. I encourage everyone to take a look at the XML template and see how easy it is to create your own theme. Perhaps one day Google will have a large directory of user-created themes. If they don’t then I’m sure some enterprising person will create their own. Until then, if you like the Green Bay Packers or are simply looking for an alternative to Google’s provided themes, then give SimplePackers a try.