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Widget Workshop's Forum Nokia Blog

Start of the Widget Workshop (or taking the red widget pill)

mobileradicals | 16 August, 2007 19:40

Welcome to our (Paul Coulton and Will Bamford’s) new Start2Finish blog called Widget Workshop. This will be an evolutionary series of blogs revealing our experiences developing a range of widgets from a standing start of no prior experience. In other words, we are 'Widget Virgins'. We say evolutionary, as we don’t really have any firm plans of what we are going to develop and principally want to explore as many of the capabilities as possible and hopefully demonstrate the power of the technology.
Besides the basic intro to the project we thought we would start by clearing up the difference between WidSets widgets and S60 Widgets (Web Run-Time). There are obvious similarities in terms of ease of distribution and likely use, but we also want to explore the differences between these technologies from a developer's perspective, so let’s start with a brief overview of each technology (a more comprehensive discussion/comparison is available here and here).
WidSets Widgets
This is essentially a Java-based platform. Widgets can be developed using the WidSets Studio, a very easy to use online visual editor for developing simple widgets in a matter of minutes. However, these widgets are essentially limited to picking up RSS feeds (for displaying text and photos). To create custom functionality, developers need to delve into Helium script, a ‘Java like’ language for controlling all aspect of a widget’s behaviour. We need to download the WidSets SDK to create Helium-powered widgets.
S60 Widgets
These are lightweight mobile browser applications developed using familiar, standards-based web technologies such as (x)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and even advanced AJAX. In order to run S60 Widgets, the phone needs the run-time installed (future S60 phones will have this installed as standard).
At the present we will be developing WidSets widgets for the workshop, although we hope to cover both in the future when we get access to a suitable phones for development and/or Nokia’s Web Run-Time SDK is released.
We hope you will help, hinder, make suggestions for widgets (preferably fun ones) or just observe our efforts.
Cheers

Enterprise, Entertainment | Next | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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Re: Start of the Widget Workshop (or taking the red widget pill)

tote_b5 | 17/08/2007, 13:00

tote_b5 Looking forward to your tutorial, Paul and Will. I've always wanted to delve into Widgets to see how it works and how one can play/work with it: now you give it to me for free. :) Thanks!

Tote

Re: Start of the Widget Workshop (or taking the red widget pill)

mobileradicals | 17/08/2007, 13:35

Tote
I hope it proves a useful insight for you and others. I think there are many people out there interested in this topic but without the time to play like us ;)

Re: Start of the Widget Workshop (or taking the red widget pill)

slimpixi | 02/09/2007, 12:49

slimpixi hi it's not clear to me the difference. you say widsets are limited to the rss feed, however there are many games that have been made that you can play like soduku, on the widsets. so how can you say it's only limited to rss? there are clocks also that have nothing to do with rss. so I'm really not clear about the difference according to your explanation. one of the main differences that i see are:

the widgets are on the s60 device and need not be installed
the widsets needs an account signup and client installed

what other differences exist and why is one superior to the other? what made s60 create widgets and nokia create widsets? how is a consumer to choose which is the superior system to use.

another feature that the widsets has is the fact that you can sms propagate it--you can send your widset to someone else and make it more popular. how do widgets on s60 get propagated? how do people download them or know about them when they buy the phone? in widsets there is a gallery in the client where you can select a category and search several different ways.

what are the developer benefits for creating a widget vs a widset? with limited time and resources available and you could only choose one, which would be the best to choose to develop?

Re: Start of the Widget Workshop (or taking the red widget pill)

mobileradicals | 03/09/2007, 13:27

Hi anina,

We were referring only to those widgets created with the online WidSets Studio (although I expect the WidSets team will increase the power of this tool in the future). In fact, we're creating a game for WidSets (http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/view_entry.html?id=681) and the platform itself allows for a wide-range of different types of widget besides glorified RSS readers.

In terms of comparison between WidSets and S60 Widgets, that's something that we hope to discover as we go along. We're not experts yet, just curious developers.
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