Widget World

So I’ve recently received a new mobile phone that runs Windows Mobile 6. What this means for this site, is that I might start to focus more on Windows Mobile 6, since its also part of my job. I’ve noticed a lack to a point of good sites out there that have Windows Mobile content, or the way its displayed is done poorly, I’m hoping in the upcoming weeks and months to either create a new site devoted to Windows Mobile and software etc, or to merge into this site. At the current moment its going to be a mix and match of content, but since I’ve not posted anything Gadget related in a long time, I could quiet easily see this site becoming my Windows Mobile site. Hopefully you’ll stay on board, and hopefully I’ll get more visitors as time moves on.

I’ve created a new Vista Gadget for viewing your task lists on Toodledo, the great To-Do/Task list site that I’ve been using for the last few months.  It allows you to view your top tasks.

Toodledo Vista Gadget

• Windows Gadget SDK and docs (MSDN)
• Gadget Development Overview (MSDN)
• Creating Windows Gadgets (Part 1) (TechNet)
• Windows Gadget Gallery
• Introduction to Sidebar gadgets
• Windows Vista: Windows Sidebar and gadgets
• microsoftgadgets.com

Introduction

I’ve been a developer for over 10 years and recently entered the world of widgets/gadgets thanks to my employer, AccuWeather.com. My first real widget was for the Google home page. I also released a toolbar for Internet Explorer that provides a current weather forecast. My attention then turned to developing a gadget for Vista that provided similar information. The data comes directly from AccuWeather.com via an XML feed that has been customized for the Vista gadgets being developed for AccuWeather.com.

The gadget expands on the default gadget packaged with Vista by providing weather alerts and a more comprehensive city lookup.

This article will detail exactly how I built the Vista AccuWeather forecast gadget, the obstacles I overcame, and how I used the functionality provided by the Vista Sidebar api.
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My appologies for not updating any sooner, I’ve not had the time to dedicate myself to this blog as much as I would have liked in recent months.  However I’m going to try and update it a little more now.

The other good news is that I’m going to be releasing a couple of widgets for Windows Vista which will be available on the Windows Live Gallery in the next few days.  I also have a tutorial that I wrote for Codeproject that details how I built the one widget and some of the issues and difficulties I had with building it.  I plan to post it here in the next little while.

I’ll be posting again soon, however events in my personal life had limited my time near a computer right now so bare with me while I’ll deal with those.

I wasn’t planning on making the intro a two part post, but the more I thought about what I had missed out on my first post I wanted to follow up with a second post to cover some of the more important things I had missed.

One of the main benefits of the Google home is that is platform independent, you just need a compatible browser, the main browsers work just fine, I’ve tested it with Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0 beta as well as IE6 and IE7, I’m pretty confident that other browsers work just fine also.  It uses a combination of AJAX and DHTML to perform its magic.

Development is fairly straightforward using JavaScript and XML to perform the majority of tasks.  The widget I built uses JavaScript and an RSS feed for its data.  The built in functions that Google provide handle a lot of the XML parsing and retrieval of data from external sources with ease.

To be able to customize your own page you do need to register, if you have a gmail account you’re in luck, but registration is easy plus your account can then be used for some of the other great Google services.

My next intro is going to cover the Yahoo! Widget engine, keep your eyes open for it.

Technorati Tags: Google home, Google, Google widgets

So I’m going to do a little intro for all the different types of Widgets / Gadgets that are out there currently for Windows and Hopefully Mac OS X, and if lucky maybe even some of the Linux KDE and Gnome Widgets.

My first introduction is the Google Home Page Gadgets.  Currently if you go to Google.com and select personalized home, you can customize your home page on Google.com to reflect what you want to see.  For example you can add in the current weather, slashdot.org rss feeds, news feeds from around the globe, the scores from your favorite football team and a manner of other useful information.

Here is a sample screenshot of a Google.com personalized home page.

As you can see from the screenshot above there a few things that can be added to the Google home page.  There is always something new being added to the repository, which can be accessed by the link in the top left hand corner.  You can also write your own widget and publish it to be accessible from the Google widget repository.  The documentation for developers is very concise and helpful, there is also a discussion group available to discuss with other developers any issues you might have.  I myself have written a Google widget which was a fun experience and provided me with some good insight on how to build more widgets in the future.

I would certainly recommend using the Google home page as a portal because it provides a wealth of content is pretty fast considering the dynamic content being pulled in, and its very easy to rearrange the windows, its just a matter of drag and drop and you can rearrange the whole page to your liking.

I plan to revisit the Google Home page in a later article when I’ll go into some of the details of developing widgets as well as reviewing some of the more popular and useful widgets that are currently available.

Technorati Tags: google widgets, google home

After only a month I’ve decided this blog needs a dramatic change of direction.  After spending many hours figuring out the best course of action I’ve decide that this current blog isn’t anything too great.

The problem is that the blogsphere is huge and there are a lot of blogs out there that cover the same thing with a small twist, now I can continue you my current style and blog content adding my own twist, but I don’t feel like I’m achieving much and honestly its not that interesting of fascinating to me.  I’ve reached a rut but its not a rut that I can get over so to speak not without retooling and rediscovering things that I want to write about.

Now the million dollar question what is this blog going to be about from now on, well its going to be about Widgets.  What’s a widget you ask, well for example, if you have the latest version of Google Desktop, and you have a few of those nice little apps on your desktop, those are Widgets, if you use Yahoo Widgets, you know what I’m talking about, Live.com or Google.com has widgets on their homepages you can build and use, and Windows Vista has the sidebar as well that you can build Widgets for.  This blog is going to be about all these, how to build them, good resources, and last but not least I’m going to review the best and the worst.  Why did I decide to do this, well for starters I’ve been writing Widgets in my new job and had a lot of fun doing it, and I will continue to write them and I figured hey why not blog about them provide the rest of the world with a nice resource for writing widgets.

So with out much fanfare I present you the new and improved Widget World, the place to find out about everything Widget.

Technorati Tags: widgets, Google widget, yahoo widget, live.com widget

So I’ve been running Firefox 2.0 beta 1 since it came out, I’m a web developer and so I figured I’d get a look at the latest and greatest. I did have some gripes about beta 1 like the crashing everytime I tried to edit my blog, which in turn was caused by the one of the cooliest features I liked which was the inline spell checking for text boxes. Now beta 2 is out I’m hoping that it fixes a lot of the bugs and makes it more stable, now of course some of my extensions now don’t work, of course its the ones I use the most, so I’ll have to figure out the best solution to fix those.

If you are one of those cutting edge types then give it a try, and if you’re not, well I wouldn’t recommend it just yet, because its still pretty unstable and only aimed at developers.

Link to it here