Last Friday I visited Six Apart’s headquarters in San Francisco to talk about widgets with Byrne Reese. Byrne is the former product manager of TypePad, currently a product manager of Movable Type, and a developer of plugins and widgets used in both products. Byrne and I talked about the current state of widgets in Six Apart’s four blogging products: TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Vox. Our 25-minute conversation about Six Apart widgets is available as a 11 MB audio download. I will summarize a few highlights from our conversation below. Listen to Niall Kennedy interview Byrne Reese of Six Apart…
Category Archives: Social
Universality of the web widget
Netvibes announced a “Universal Widget API” at last week’s Future of Web Apps conference in London, promising a write-once run anywhere widget environment using an open-source widget runtime. The new widget system encourages publishers to author widgets using the Netvibes API and extend the reach of their content beyond the Netvibes user base through an adaptable wrapper. In this post I’ll walk through some of the differences between widget deployment endpoints from the publisher’s point of view, explaining just a few ways a widget must adjust its dialect and structure to adapt and optimize in different widget environments. Manifests Inline…
Yahoo! centralizes its JavaScript network with free hosting
Yahoo! is opening up the JavaScript powering its websites a bit more tonight, encouraging developers to directly reference libraries on its servers from within their webpages. Yahoo! User Interface Hosting opens up versioned access to the popular YUI Library, creating faster load times for sites across the web using Yahoo’s optimized, geo-distributed, and reliable data centers. Many websites utilize common libraries for JavaScript development, creating a drop-down menu, file retrieval, or chart rendering using a library such as Prototype, script.aculo.us, dojo, and many others. If five Ruby on Rails sites utilize the same script.aculo.us library for effects you’ll have to…
Netvibes module developer collects web credentials, personal content
A French security blogger gained access to private user data on personal homepage service Netvibes last weekend, exposing stored usernames and passwords for popular integrated web services as well as user content loaded in the page. The blogger’s account has since been deleted from Blog*Spot (currently cached on Yahoo!), but he provided extended details to French blog Le blog de ¥€$ (English translation). Netvibes has since claimed to patch “a security vulnerability in webnotes” exploited by this developer. I alluded to some of these issues with stored user information, phishing, and general brand confusion in a post two months ago…
Apple Dashcode developer preview available for download
Apple released a developer beta version of Dashcode, a widget development environment included in its upcoming Leopard operating system. The preview software is available for Tiger until July. (via Brent Simmons) Dashcode lets anyone design a new widget through a drag and drop interface or by directly editing the underlying code. Bundled widget templates include a countdown timer, latest items from a web feed, web feed single item view, podcast, photocast, and an activity monitor. Dashcode will debug your Dashboard widget code placing all of your files within the appropriate package and generates additional nice touches such as a…
2007 tech predictions
Welcome to 2007! Americans celebrate the dawning of a new year by throwing calendars out the window, watching countless games of college football sponsored by snack foods, and nursing hangovers from a night of rowdy drinking. We emerge from this haze ready to take on a new year of challenges, hopes and dreams. Let’s take a look at three top technology trends I expect will have a big influence on our tech world in 2007
Grope-worthy Windows Vista laptops
The consumer version of Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system is only a month away and bloggers are already receiving their first review units. So far the review units sound pretty boring compared to the Windows Vista capable hardware available throughout the world. I put together my own list of five grope-worthy notebook computers ready to test Vista on multiple fronts. You might prefer a silent ultra-portable or a power-hungry luggable. You can search for WiFi without ever opening your computer or get online anywhere with cellular broadband. The latest Apple hardware runs Vista without a problem too. I expect this…
Memory utilization of widget systems
Widgets can be described as mini-applications, running code that binds itself to a web browser and/or the resident operating system to display information. Just like regular applications, widgets consume system resources such as processor cycles, memory, and network bandwidth, possibly slowing down other functions on your computer or across the network. In this post I will take a look at the resource utilization of desktop and web-based widget platforms across a few common widget applications. Background I bought a PowerBook in the summer of 2004 and moved into the world of OS X. Expose and Dashboard were completely new user…
Bebo adds widget support
Social networking site Bebo took its first step into the widget realm yesterday, including support for Flash-powered photo slideshow widgets from PhotoBucket, Slide, or RockYou. Each partner site uses the newly created Bebo API to pass a fully configured widget back to Bebo without exposing details such as HTML code snippets to its users. The direct partnerships and whitelisted widgets allow Bebo to slowly add more customization options in a controlled environment, hopefully avoiding some of the security and general exploit issues present on MySpace. Each member profile now has a new widget configuration option. Users can comment on…
Brands will be widgetized, but who is the author?
Companies who embrace widgets may be less likely to suffer phishing attacks and bloated bandwidth consumed by third-party creations. Popular content will eventually find its way into widget platforms by scrape or by frame, and it’s best to get ahead of the potential pitfalls and embrace the new medium. Two types of widgets have been on my mind this weekend as a potential issue for companies who fail to ride the widgets wave. Protecting user information Sites with personal user data placed behind a username and password may be subject to new types of phishing attacks from the widget web….