OUseful Info

Universal Gadgets

A quick round up post on several recent announcements in the gadget/widget arena.

Yesterday, Google announced that Google gadgets have gone universal. Once you've defined your Google gadget, it can be added to your Google homepage, the Google Desktop, or displayed on your own web page.

Google's Universal Gadgets are wrapped in a small amount of XML and can be coded using static HTML and Javascript, as you might imagine, but there's also the option of pulling in remote content too (as text, XML or JSON) from a specified URL using the Google gadger API. User preferences and gadget customisation options are also supported.

At the current time, adding a Google gadget to your web page is done 'one at a time' - for every gadget you want on your page, you need to add a separate script element to pull in that gadget.

This differs from the approach taken by Widgetbox and Snipperoo where you create panels that can be included in a web page, and then add widgets/gadgets/modules to those panels via a control panel on the host site (i.e. at Widgetbox or Snipperoo).

Although the panel approach means that a) all your widgets appear next to each other; and b) you have to accept the fact that that container panel is branded, this approach seems far more useable to me. You could imagine blogging tools offering the option to either switch on or disable a panel forexample, and then allow the user to select the widgets they want from another control panel. A no-coding solution (as far as the user is concerned) which is likely to be attractive to many users.

On the topic of widgets, gadgets,whatever...., it's also worth bearing in mind what are effectively 'widget portals' - personal desktops like Pageflakes and Netvibes.

Netvibes updated earlier this week and now offers a reorganised sidebar, some new colour themes, and improved cross browser support.

Pageflakes is updating later this week with improved group handling/sharing, which as I've posted before is potentially an attractive feature for educators wanting their students to use this sort of tool.

The problem with all these sites offering similar propositions that differ in the detail - i.e. different widget wrappers, user preference definitions, internal Javascript APIs and so on - is that although they off cross-browser solutions for widget developers, we now have cross-platform incompatibilities.

To reuse my deliSearch widget from WIdgetbox on Google, Netvibes or Pageflakes means I have to tinker with at least the wrapper, if not the code.

When (if...) I get round to making more involved widgets, it would make sense to use the native APIs provided by the various widget hosts - for example, the Google Universal Gadget API, the Pagelflakes API or the Netvibes API.

What would be really neat would be to see a cross-platform widget API to develop against that could be configured to use Google/Netvibes/Pageflakes functions natively, where available, and 'standard' calls (such as prototype/scriptaculous or YUI toolkit calls) if not...

PS It really seems to be the week of the widgets... just spotted this item on Ajaxian: WidSets: Nokia Mobile Widgets, which seems to have picked up on this Widsets press release.

Widsets are 'mobile phone browser independent' and I guess run on a Java platform, if this is anything to go by: "WidSets supports Java-enabled cell phones.".

Dion also comments: "Soon someone will create a meta widget API that generates widget code for the various widget platforms :)"

;-)

Posted by ajh59 at October 4, 2006 10:45 AM