Widgets or Won’tgets

28Feb/073

Widgets or Won’tgets

The rise of the widget is upon us. Finally all of those OOP examples will be put to use. We’re building widgets/gadgets.

Given how many different startups and companies are jumping on the widget bandwagon, and it is a bandwagon make no mistake about that, you would think there would be a wide variety of widgets available.

Let’s look at Google’s gadgets. There’s a clock widget, nice round ‘analog’ dial. A Digg gadget so I can see the top 10 stories. Oooh, there’s a POP3 mail gadget. Ah, a weather gadget. Good, good.

Let’s check out Windows/MSN Live. Ahh, they have a clock gadget too. There’s a Digg gadget. POP3 gadget. hmmmmm

Yourminis.com – Another clock gadget, still round. Digg, Pop3. weather. Yawn.

Apple Dashboard – several POP3. Ahh, more clocks. Digg. weather.

Netvibes is just going to make it so you can use THIER clock widget on ANYONES portal.

All the widgets sets are the same. Games – Tetris and Sudoku. Delicious bookmarks.

Now some of them, yourminis for one, want you to be able to use the widget on your desktop OR in your browser. What’s the advantage to that? Flash is notorious for grabbing ahold of your CPU cycles and making them work mandatory overtime. I want that on my desktop too? Plus isn’t the whole point of widgets that they gather data from the web and you can use the from any computer? How does putting one on my desktop and better solution than having them in my browser?

The point of this post? There’s no point to this post. It’s just another widget.

Filed under: General Leave a comment

http://www.yourmins.com hart

Hi,

I’m one of the developers for yourminis.com. Widgets are, by nature, mostly boring. Then again, I wouldn’t say Microsoft Word or Mozilla Firefox are particularly interesting, by themselves. It’s really what you do with the application that makes it interesting. We are constantly seeking new ways to empower our users to create whatever they want (we provide the “Legos” if you will). Check out http://www.yourminis.com/browse.aspx?c=0&s=view&t=week&p=1 to see some of the stuff people have made.

As far as moving to the desktop, I can see a number of interesting possibilities with our Apollo driven widget. For example, I could drag and drop files onto a box.net widget and then others would be able to directly download those files off my public page. Or I could create a slideshow to share from pictures on my computer without the security restrictions of a browser. Or if I simply wanted an RSS feed without having to create an entire new browser tab/window, it could be done easily, across Mac/PC/Linux seamlessly. FYI, Flash content (when programmed properly, and I stress properly) is one of the most powerful and efficient mediums for displaying dynamic web content (especially AS3, which we will probably port to soon). In my playing around with Apollo thus far, I can tell you that it is not memory/cpu intensive, so rest your fears about it eating up system resources. Anyway, we appreciate criticism as much as praise, so if you want to help make our stuff better please send any thoughts on where we can improve to forums.yourminis.com. Thanks!
Scott

Hi Hart,

Thanks for the comment and information.

I’ve been hearing that Flash isn’t processor intensive ever since Flash 4. My CPU meter still pegs anytime I have a browser window with Flash movies in it open and in the foreground. Animation, and especially animation within the context of a browser or browser plugin is expensive in terms of computer resources.

I have less faith in yourminis.com’s widgets simply because they ARE Flash based. Most people aren’t going to plop down $400 for the Basic edition of Adobe Flash just to make a widget. I think your company realizes that and is probably designing the API to reduce the amount of interaction a widget developer has with the Flash itself to a minimum. I look forward to the public release of the Mini’s API in the next month or so.

One bright spot in all of the boring widgets is that no matter which companies platform I choose, I’ll always have a clock widget, SuDoKu widget, and Digg widget available to me.
http://www.someelement.com Ryan Gahl

Scott, I hear ya brother. Currently widgets are isolated bits… nothing interesting is possible until widgets can easily be mashed together. You gotta admit, though, steps are being taken, and the future for syndicated web applications (read: next-gen widgets) looks interesting.

pipes.yahoo.com
http://www.teqlo.com
http://www.coghead.com
http://www.bungeelabs.com
etc.. etc…

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