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Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system includes support for widgets on every desktop. Windows widgets are permanently docked in a sidebar, providing up-to-date information and easy access to small tasks throughout the day. In this article I will walk you through the major components of a Windows Vista Sidebar gadget including major differentiating features, best practices, and tips for widget packaging and distribution.
The total number of widget platforms and deployment options intimidate many newcomers. Each platform offers a unique audience and features, but widget basics remain the same across Windows Vista, Nokia S60, Google, MySpace. and more. In this post I will outline the basic components of a widget including static assets, user preferences, processing remote data, and rendering your final widget.
Microsoft opened a new online marketplace last night to sell a new class of desktop and web applications directly to consumers. The new version of Windows Live Gallery extends the existing Windows Live Gold partnership program with premium content listings, partner storefronts, and the ability to charge Microsoft’s users for each new widgets.
Google Desktop widgets can now be embedded in your iGoogle personal start page. This new functionality adds OS-level functionality such as CPU utilization, currently playing tracks in iTunes, or a battery indicator inside a Web interface. Google Desktop 5.5 is now available in a widget-only version to bridge these two worlds.
The Widget Summit schedule is now complete, and I am pretty happy with the results. My goal for the conference is to provide two days of intensive education about the current state of the widget industry and share best practices with the many new publishers entering the space. This year’s conference spans two days, October 15-16, covering both the business and implementation of widgets. I will share some of my speaker notes before the conference, but first let’s take a look at some of the overarching themes of Widget Summit.
Widget terminology often confuses newcomers. The variance of terms — widget, gadget, module, badge, button, etc. — can create impressions of a fragmented industry in its early days, not able to agree on anything as simple as a name. In this post I will walk you through the etymology and nomenclature of widgets and its variances. I interpret each term as a separate meaning, not a synonym, depending on the structure and use of widget content.
The widget technology we take for granted today has been over 25 years in the making. Small pieces of customized desktop and web content have made their way into our lives whether you call it an accessory, a widget, a web part, or a gadget. This post highlights some key moments in widget platform history that have shaped where we are today.
Google introduced a new advertising unit tonight: Google Gadgets. This new form of rich content is available everywhere AdWords image ads are currently served, and includes a completely new widget analytics system.
I am hosting a two-day widget conference October 15-16 in San Francisco. Widget Summit is the sequel to last year’s Widgets Live! conference, bringing together developers and product planners for a two-day perspective on the widget industry.
Yesterday Adobe announced support for H.264 and AAC decoding in the next version of its popular Flash Player plugin. The announcement will change the face of online video playback and production based on international standards. In this post I take a look at the major changes in Flash Player 9 “Moviestar” and how it may affect multimedia publishing on the Web.
This blog’s comments are now enhanced with the YUI Rich Text Editor. I’m already familiar with the YUI JavaScript library, so when this new feature was included last week’s 2.3 release I decided to try out a progressive commenting enhancement. In this post I’ll walk you through how to implement YUI’s Rich Text Editor on your own blog with comment-specific features.
Apple is syndicating iTunes purchase history and user reviews as Flash widgets and Atom feeds under a new program called My iTunes Widgets. Any iTunes Music Store customer can opt-in to sharing their subscribed podcasts, purchased music, music video, TV shows, movies, and positive reviews through an account preference set in the iTunes application.
In this post I’ll compare performance and developer friendliness of JavaScript mapping APIs and dissect choices made by each platform that may affect your website.
I’m hosting a WordCamp kickoff dinner tomorrow night starting at 6:30 p.m. at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher at the Ferry Building. It’s our second-annual WordCamp kickoff dinner welcoming visitors from out of town with burgers, beer, and blogs along the San Francisco waterfront.
In this post I’ll outline different ways you can take advantage of Google’s architecture to serve your widget content to the world. I’ll cover various depths of integration and their branding and licensing issues.
In this post I’ll provide tips and tricks for widget developers interested in serving fast, reliable widget content to as many people as possible. I’ll highlight some of the best practices for serving web content and their specific application towards widget development.
In my last post I wrote about web widget formats: the ways we render widget content within another web site. Web widgets are dynamic, living, breathing pieces of content and often need new data from external services to stay fresh and topical. In this post I’ll summarize popular methods of updating a widget’s dynamic data using remote HTML framing, plain-text, JSON, XML, and web feeds. I will detail use cases of each format, provide example data to illustrate the data, and document the appropriate request and parsing libraries in major web widget platforms.
Web widgets vary by platform and provider but generally come in four basic flavors: JavaScript, embedded object, blog plugin, and frames. Anyone publishing widget content online should know a few basic concepts shaping their decision and choose the right mix of software and content based on their target. In this post I’ll walk through some of the basic advantages, disadvantages, and considerations for each type of widget content and bring you up-to-speed on a few current widget deployment options.
Google is directly investing in small companies to expand the popularity of its iGoogle product. Google Gadget Ventures grants popular Google gadgets $5,000 for further development. Popular widget businesses are eligible for $100,000 in seed capital with Google taking an equity stake in each company. Google expects to invest $700,000 or more in third-party widget development over the next year. About 9% of Google’s gadget directory would be eligible for the grant consideration based on the Google Gadget pageview analysis I last conducted in April. How it works A gadget must have at least 250,000 gadget views per week to…
Steve Jobs announced the iPhone development platform at last week’s Worldwide Developer Conference to sighs of disappointments. Mac developers were anxious to develop new applications for the the most anticipated consumer electronics device in years, only to be told they should code fancy websites instead. The 9-minute iPhone development demonstration during the WWDC keynote was a bit confusing for anyone new to Apple widget development. In this post I’ll break down a few Apple widget components, transport you to the iPhone development world, and explain a few restrictions and lock-downs common in the mobile phone industry. Dashboard under the…
Tonight I am unveiling a new site tracking the startup ecosystem. It’s a directory and analytics tool I’ve personally wanted for a long time, and I know others will enjoy. Introducing Startup Search. Startup Search tracks Web startups, their products, key employees, investment firms, and investment partners. Startup Search also tracks the success of each product since it was first introduced to the world, using publicly available metrics pulled into a single page. It’s a research tool, a discovery engine, and a fact-filled directory of our little Web startup world. I’ll walk through a few features. Directory data Startup Search…
Kevin Ham built a $300 million web company in Vancouver you’ve probably never heard of. You are likely familiar with his work as you drop vowels from the domain names of your favorite web startups such as Flickr or Tumblr, or try selecting a name for your new company or product. Kevin Ham built a domain name empire named Agoga, cutting exclusive deals with local registrars and national governments, attracting over 30 million unique visitors a month according to an article by Paul Sloan in the June issue Business 2.0 magazine. Think of a name, any name, and it’s probably…
Microsoft will offer three tiers of partner support for Windows Live Gallery according to a podcast with Chris Butler this week posted on LiveSide. Companies and brands may partner with Microsoft to highlight their Windows Live Gadget offerings for preferred inclusion in the Live.com personal homepage, Windows Live Spaces sidebar, and the Windows Vista sidebar. Windows Live Gallery partners receive visual differentiation in the customization listings and programmatic access to the Gallery serves to add and update new Microsoft gadget content. Microsoft plans to offer external developers three tiers of support: Gold partner A premium offering associated with an…
Google’s search result ranking algorithm received a major upgrade yesterday, incorporating its vertical search properties directly in the main search result page. The new design, Universal Search, integrates results from specialized Google verticals such as blogs, images, news, maps, and video. Results we’ve previously expected to find inside of a OneBox now appear anywhere in the users’ result listings thanks to rewritten ranking and content examination algorithms. Examining vertical search Google and other large search engines crawl the worldwide web for new information every minute of every day. The modern web consists of billions of documents expressed in multiple formats…
Webmasters will soon be able to auction off widget space on their sites and blogs managed and marketed by advertising powerhouse Google. Advertisers will produce a Google Gadget in standard IAB unit sizes for distribution across the Google network at CPC or CPM billing rates. Google will bolster its current Google Analytics package to support better tracking paid and free widget campaigns in this sub-page and asynchronous pageload environment. The Google Gadget advertising beta program was publicly announced during a marketing summit for the automotive industry according to Online Media Daily. By the end of 2007 Google will offer its…