netvibes - (re)mix the web

The Universal Widget API has been available since March 9th, 2007 now, and it was released roughly one year after we launched MiniAPI. MiniAPI has been a huge success, but it was superseded by UWA, and got deprecated on July 9th, 2007 - that is, it is no longer possible to submit a MiniAPI module […]

The Netvibes Ecosystem has its share of search widgets, mostly because they’re easy to build: make a test request in the original search site, write down the search URL, build it into a widget and make that widget open a new page with the search string neatly placed into the search URL.
This is nice, since […]

One of the requirements we insist on for developing UWA widget is to use the UTF-8 character encoding - and when I write “we insist”, we really mean it.
It’s not that we find other encodings uncool - really, ISO-8859-1 is a nice fella, and had Ken Thompson and Rob Pike not found themselves in front […]

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 […]

Some of you may have witnessed what we’ve been doing with Netvibes Premium Widgets (marked with the distinction logo): basically pushing our UWA TabView controler to its limits.
Until know the TabView documentation was basic, if even sparse: because using tabs should be done up-front when starting a new widget, we didn’t want to […]

Deep in the confines of the - very complete - UWA documentation, lies informations that might be important enough to be push to the surface on this blog.
The page we are talking about is the aptly-named “Using events in UWA“. Let’s sum this already short page up: simply put, inline events handlers cannot work properly […]

Not everyone knows it, but you can access and control the internal podcast player using UWA - and we’ll show you how in this very article.

The example used here is the excellent Web Radio Player widget, built by Maurice Svay and which lets you play audio streams in MP3 format from the renown ShoutCast service.

When […]

We’ve been through a lot of things since we started this series of articles, but the part we are entering now is what will make a difference in your widget. Many widget are able to display public data, and others can display private data just fine, but being able to also publish data directly from […]

So far, this series of articles have focused on getting and displaying public data, like Twitter public timeline in the previous part of this series of tutorials.
Public data is what most of the current web services will let you play with, but the more interesting services are those that let you manipulate your private […]

The first part of this series saw us build a widget that displayed a single Twitter status. The second part built upon the first on, and expanded the widget to display the whole public timeline feed, all the while learning UWA techniques and good practices.
Techniques and best practices are the central elements of […]