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Using UWA’s JSON Feed format

UWA provides a fair number of built-in Ajax methods:

UWA.Data.getXmlwhen you want to get XML data (including well-formed XHTML), and be able to parse it using XML’s DOM properties and methods (parentNode, childNodes, attributes, getElementsByTagName, etc.),
UWA.Data.getTextwhen you just want to get the data in plain text, and maybe parse it using a regexp,
UWA.Data.getJsonwhen you want to safely […]

Ginger’s new functionalities for UWA developers (part 1)

With the arrival of Netvibes Ginger, users can now have two sides for their Netvibes account: one private (the classic page), where users put their favorite and most useful widgets like e-mails, feeds, social networks, all to be seen by them only ; and one public (the Netvibes Universe), where the users will tend to […]

Converting a MiniAPI module to a UWA widget (part 7)

We’ve seen how to switch to UWA pretty all available MiniAPI functionalities in this series’ previous articles. Now is the time to touch on functionalities that cannot be switch as-is, or simply put, that are not available in the stricter, more portable Universal Widget API.
One of the toughest of these is preferences. Sure, we’ve […]

Setting your regions right in Ecosystem

Ginger is now open to everyone, and you can all see the new functionalities.
Among these is the integrated search: you don’t need to go to Ecosystem to find new cool stuffs to add to your personal page or your Universe, you can simply search Ecosystem and directly receive the corresponding list of feeds and UWA […]

UWA developers: Jeremy Selier

Jeremy Selier is a backend guy at heart, but has been exploring widget-making using UWA, documenting his findings along the way on his French blog. We thought it’d be interesting to ask for his feedback as new widget developer, seeing how his second one, TV Shows, was already pretty advanced.
Your first UWA widget is Personalized […]

Turn any web page into a UWA widget with Automatic Parser

(See bottom of the post for an update)
Netvibes was created as a way to gather all your digital life in one handy place, providing in-house for your most important digital needs: search, e-mail, to-do list, feed-reader, bookmarks & links, weather, calendar…
It quickly turned out that our users needed access to more digital content than we […]

Preparing for Ginger (part 2)

Most of you must have received an invitation code to the Ginger beta now, wether thanks to your Ecosystem widget submission, or through any other general codes that could be found on various website in the past few weeks.
Finding the UWA Test module
Using the UWA Test module to test how a widget is doing […]

Converting a MiniAPI module to a UWA widget (part 6)

One question keeps coming up from people who have taken the dive and converted their module to a widget. It’s pretty simple, and represents an essential part of such conversion. This post will therefore be suitably short.
I’m done converting. It works. What’s next?
The “what’s next?” part implies a lot of questions, but mostly they are […]

Ways to conceive a popular widget

Netvibes Ecosystem presently contains more than 200 000 items, among which some more 100 000 widgets - which can look a bit impressive to new UWA developers wanting to make their mark in there, and get their own widgets to many user-pages.
Fortunately, Ecosystem does not solely rely on a search engine to help users find […]

Follow the US Presidential Primaries with UWA widgets

Super Tuesday is (quite literally) right around the corner, and real-time information is where widgets can shine. Indeed, user androostevens understood the need, and submitted no less than 4 Primaries-related widgets.
These widget rely on data from AOL News, which has built a dedicated Elections page. They cleverly mix AOL’s Flash applications with a UWA drop-down […]