Posted by Niklas Heidloff | August 13, 2009
I've posted three new widgets in the Widget
Library project.
Widget
for Dictionary.com
Widget
for Google Reader
Widget
for CDC Travel Health Map
I will post three more widgets tomorrow
and we have some more good ones in the pipeline, but we/IBM would like
to receive some feedback about how to do widgets longer-term. I was surprised
to see that many blog readers yesterday. However posting good quality widgets
takes time. While the 'development' of widgets is very fast, the documentation,
testing, insurance of naming conventions, taking screenshots, publishing
them on OpenNTF etc. takes much more time.
IBM has many widgets available internally
that could be published on OpenNTF. But not all widgets might make sense
to be published to OpenNTF. For example N number of weather widgets, map
widgets or translation widgets don't really add value.
Also local widgets often don't make
sense if they can only be used in one country. Only if they can easily
be mapped to other services in other countries publications would make
sense. Other OpenNTF contributors might want to provide country specific
widget libraries.
Additionally widgets that are basically
just one static URL don't add much value since they would just be bookmarks.
At a minimum these widgets should do login where Notes does the SSO. It
would even be better if these widgets show information in context by passing
in context as URL parameters.
So the idea of this widget library and
the catalog is to allow Notes users to easily install and try Notes widgets
by just dragging and dropping them onto their Notes clients. The key purpose
of this library is to give people ideas about what value widgets add so
that end users will start 'developing' their own ones or that administrators
create their own ones for their end users.
And just to make sure people don't get
me wrong. I'm asking here for feedback how IBM should handle widgets on
OpenNTF. Other OpenNTF contributors are free to create their own projects
with widgets.
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