netvibes - (re)mix the web

(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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The gates are opening up, and a few thousand of people now have access to the beta version of Ginger, thanks to invite codes given out by many online publications and blogs (to name a few: Techcrunch, Wired, Facebook, GigaOm and others…).
If you are not one of the lucky guys, fret not: you are […]

The main idea behind this series of articles is, as you’d have guessed by now, to take over the MiniAPI tutorial and push it into the 21st century, kicking and screaming show how easy it can be to get the same effects in UWA. The most acute readers among you would have noticed that we […]

Here comes the high point of this series of articles, where all the bricks come together. During the first three parts, I’ve been banging one specific drum: whereas MiniAPI modules could be based on a multitude of inter-linked dynamic files, UWA widgets should really stick to one static file, and rely on Ajax requests to […]

We’ve seen a lot already: now you should be familiar with the differences between a MiniAPI file and a UWA one, and you should know how to convert a MiniAPI configuration form into a UWA preferences form. Now is the time to dive into a more advanced feature, one that will be of use to […]

It takes more than just updating the emulation files’ URLs to turn a MiniAPI module into a fully working UWA widget. In the first part of this series of articles, we saw that many others section of the HTML code itself need to be upgraded, and the documentation already indicates which MiniAPI function calls have […]