Back to my page

Developer Blog



Posts Tagged ‘widget’

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 […]

Update your widget’s content cleanly with Ajax

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 […]

Local widgets: because your neighbor is probably a Netvibes user too

Most of you have come to Netvibes for the global widgets, the all-in-one start-page with all your everyday services at your fingertips. And that’s cool, but there’s more to the Internet than Yahoo!, Gmail, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube, y’know?
You might not be aware of this, but Netvibes is not one start-page, but many start-pages: […]

Use UTF-8 in your widgets and live happily ever after

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 […]

Netvibes’ Facebook widget 4th most active Facebook external application

Last August, we introduced the Facebook widget, a concentration of tight JavaScript code which ties your Facebook profile to your Netvibes personal page, allowing you to view your Facebook notifications and friends.
Since then, it has proven to be one of the most successful external app in Facebook’s Desktop application directory, being 4th in both “Most […]

Uploading your UWA widget on other widget directories

Having the ability to get your widget to work on many platforms is one excellent thing, of which we are very proud, but we are also aware of the fact that most users of a given platform look for widgets on that platform’s central widget repository/directory.
Even if Ecosystem is the best place to submit […]

Put a UWA widget around your Flash application

There are many applications out there that would be useful to Netvibes users - and UWA users in general, but whose developer chose to use Flash instead of relying on easy-to-parse standards or easy-to-implement Web services. As highlighted in our post about the new Netvibes Ecosystem, logged-in users can now directly submit the URL of [...]

Widgets as financial tools

As you might have noticed by now, we like to take advantage of recent submissions to Ecosystem in order to spotlight one particular use of widgets in general, or of UWA in particular. The point being to show the wide array of possibilities that a widget or a Netvibes tab can have.
This is especially the […]

Find your way home with UWA widgets

These days, thanks to the constant improvement of mapping services, it’s easier than ever to find your way home (or to that faraway party). UWA widgets help you a bit further. See, with mapping web services blossoming and opening up with APIs, our Ecosystem has seen its share of useful widgets making use of these. […]