netvibes - (re)mix the web

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 […]

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 MiniAPI has been a huge success, but it was superseded by UWA, and got deprecated on July 9th, 2007 - that is, it is no longer possible to submit a MiniAPI module […]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 […]

We already wrote about the i-Métro widget and its makers, Patrice Bernard and Frank van Caenegem. But since this is one very useful service/widget, and it makes good use of the Universal Widget API, we thought it might well be worth the time to have a chat with Mr. Bernard, the man behind the widget […]

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 […]