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