WidSets graduates!!
Nokia Beta Labs
- October 24th, 2007
The WidSets upgrade yesterday from beta to real service seems to have gone well. Congratulations!!
I guess it’s time for to set up a “graduates” section somewhere under Beta Labs…
If you haven’t tried WidSets yet, you should. And even if you did try it sometime in the past, you should try it again now. The service has evolved fast, and the widget library - including the “Explore” widget discovery system - starts to look really good.
Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.
Finally the 1.0 is here. Congratulations for the team! I downloaded the new version in the morning and the update went smoothly. My two widgets do not show the latest entries for some reason, so something is broken.
I just noticed that my widgets do update. But for some reason the RSS-entries are showed in a mixed order. Not according to a time stamps.
I find the widget tool (at least 2 weeks ago) a bit to ‘big’ for my nokie e65. the tool doesnt run smooth and takes a while to open up. Even with the settings to ‘lite’. maybe building a real lite widget system?
It works smoothly. I got the Wikipedia widget and it’s all there. Very efficient content management, as downloading the required information (in my case, the article on “Nokia”) went very fast.
The application takes a while to open up, but after that it runs smoothly on my E60.
Is there already an option for polling widset servers? I explain:
Usually I read weather forecasts and news feeds from widset. I like those to be fresh but they don’t need to be in realtime. I’d suggest that devices poll widsets server within some interval to retrieve new data (like email application does) and then disconnect only to connect again user defined time later.
This way we could maybe limit data transfer and -this is more important - boost battery life! We all know how fast 3G data connection eats your battery.. Because of that, i can’t keep widsets running background all the time. Data is not a problem, i have flat rate.
Comments?
Jasmo: good point.
When I wrote the “Secret sauce for designing mobile web apps” post:
http://blogs.s60.com/tommi/2007/04/secret_sauce_for_designing_mob.html
…I didn’t see the battery life problem.
Have to add it to the list.
A small suggestion: you could add the ability to change the background color. As the default (and only one) is blue, having the option for green, red, yellow etc would be nice.
Widsets is a good concept poorly executed. Why do these need to run in their own environment? Most S60 phones run slowly enough as it is; Widsets turns this trifling sluggishness into aggravating sloth.
It’d be far better if each widget ran natively in S60, in the background, like the Widgets in Apple’s OS X.