What’s a Wid*et?
Hints & Tips
- July 22nd, 2008
I wrote earlier that the WidSets team now offers a catalog of S60 widgets. This is a good thing, but it also seems to have created some confusion in the terminology. In an attempt to make things clearer, and to help you enjoy your widgets with a clear mind, here’s my take on the terms:
- Widgets are little Web applications, and come in many shapes and sizes
- WidSets is a service that distributes widgets.
- With some widgets, you need some sort of widget program (like the WidSets client) to see them.
- If you have an S60 phone, you can use fancier widgets that can do more stuff and can be launched directly from the application menu.
-Oren
cool, thanks for clearing things up…
all this time i was mixing up the two words.. lol
To my understanding, there are stand-alone widgets and widgets in widset (widset is a dashboard for the second type of widgets).
From technical perspective, stand-alone widgets are instances of the Web browser and created by javascript, HTML and CSS; while widgets in widset are Java applications.
Is this right?
Then there might be also confusions for developers, e.g. which type of widgets to develop? What’s the advantage for stand-alone widgets compared to widset widgets?
Also a question for Nokia: if this two types of widgets aim at providing the same user experience (e.g. two types of YTV widget do the same thing, though with slightly different GUI), what’s the benefit to provide two different solutions at the expense of confusing both users and developers?
> What’s the advantage for stand-alone widgets compared to widset widgets?
The basic tradeoff for developers here is volumes vs. features. With WidSets, you get a more limited feature set (and no application icon) in exchange for access to lots of Java-enabled devices.
Standalone (S60) widgets give you more flexibility, since you can take advantage of all of HTML, CSS, and Javascript (or, if you like, Flash Lite). You can also launch the widget from its own icon.
Looking ahead, we will be adding even more functionality to the standalone widgets, including access to platform services such as the calendar and GPS. This will give developers more options to create interesting widgets that combine Web-based data with personal “context”.