netvibes - (re)mix the web

Those of you who are used to install their favorite UWA widget on other platforms, like Apple Dashboard and Windows Vista, might have noticed that it presents the orange UWA logo as sole differentiator between your UWA widgets - and therefore, those with many widgets would end-up with a lot of same orange icons on their widgets list. Well, no more!

It has been available for a little while now, but UWA widget are able to support an additional type of icon: “rich-icon“. It works just like your usual “icon” link tag:

<link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon"
  href="http://example.com/widget/favicon.png" />
<link rel="rich-icon" type="image/png"
  href="http://example.com/widget/richicon.png"/>

Now, the files themselves work differently. While “icon” icons are expected to be .png or .ico files, within a 16*16 square, “rich-icon” icons are .png files, within a 128*128 square. This size allows to be future-proof, as it works just as well in Windows Vista, Apple Dashboard and the soon-available Yahoo! Widget engines - respectively 64*64, 75*75 and 32*32.

While not having a rich icon set in your widget does not prevent it from working, having one proves very useful for everyday use, as this slightly-reworked Apple Dashboard screen captures will attest:

Guess which one has its rich-icon set

So, make good use of it: a screen-capture, a logo, anything that can help differentiate from other widgets!

Tags: icons, uwa

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Articles, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.