Wednesday, July 30, 2008

�Manager 0.7.1 (GPL)

A ASP.NET front-end written in VB.NET to manage a Mangos server Read More

Football widgets are in season!

Football widgets are in season!
With football season fast approaching, now is the best time to put the spotlight on our Sports Scoreboard widget and the NFL Gametrax widget. These two widgets are quite possibly the best sports focused widgets ever built. At least that's what our moms say ;-)

The Gametrax widget pulls in all the currently playing games for the NFL and displays them complete with play by play action and game leaders! (can you say fantasy?)

That's a live Gametrax widget to the left, clicking on the "game" tab will show you the play by play action if there is a game currently being played.

Our Scoreboard widget pulls in a complete list of all games playing complete with live scores for the NFL (excluding preseason), MLB, NBA, NHL, College Football and College Basketball leagues.

The great thing about the Scoreboard widget is that it can be dynamically sized. It will drop down as small as 160 pixels wide so that it will fit on most blog sidebars. If you have a sports blog, this is really the best way to share scores with your readers.

The scoreboard widget set to 160 pixels wide for blog sidebar placement. You can also set the default league shown to be MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, CBK or CFB
Each league in the scoreboard gets yesterday's, tomorrow's and today's games in a tabbed format and you can set the initial display of the widget to default to any of those tabs for any league when the widget first loads.

In the yesterday tab, the final game scores along with a win/loss indicator on each team shows you quickly who was on top. Tomorrow's tab shows the game time and teams playing so that you can better plan which sports bar to visit to watch the most games at once, and the today tab shows off live in game scores on all games in the list complete with some in game leader information.

Now for the really cool info... For those of you who have our desktop application installed, the scoreboard widget really begins to shine after you download it.

Flip to the preference panel in the desktop sports Scoreboard widget and enable "docking" and you'll be able to drag the widget to the sidebar for all day sports tracking ability even when your work apps are open.

Take a few minutes and play with the widgets and feel free to use them for your desktop, blog or social network profile. If you think our moms are right and these are the best sports widgets that have ever been built, let us know.

If you are interested in more sports related widgets, search the gallery for sports. So far we have 109 sports related widgets that have been created ranging everywhere from Ask Men's Health and Sports News to the Worland Middle School Sports Schedule.

-Don

click the thumbnail to see what the Scoreboard looks like when docked on your desktop.

Feed Compare Feedburner subscriber graphs

A large number of blogs and other sites now use Feedburner as it has a number of great Pro freatures and Feedburner also allows you to transfer feed ownership between users. Whilst you can see your stats in Feedburner the graphs are not that great and you can compare them.

There is a site called Feed Compare that allows you to view the RSS subscriber data for up to 4 feeds on a single graph. This means you could compare your competitors RSS subscriber count with your own feed.

To allow you to get a better idea of subscriber numbers you can also view a graph showing data for the last month, quarter, half year, year or 2 years assuming the feed has been in existence for that long.

The reason this is such a great tool is that you can now find out exactly how a sites RSS feed has grown over time. All you need is the sites Feedburner URL which you can get by right clicking on the sites RSS feed icon and copying the URL than pasting it into Feed Compare.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

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Technorati Claiming set-up

Technorati Profile Read More

Install Feed Manager

There are two options when installing Feed Manager: Download and install the Feed Manager archive manually Install via the Plugin Manager plugin for Movable Type... Read More

Snap + AddThis = Shared Snap Shots

Today, we are very pleased to announce a new partnership between Snap and AddThis. You’ve seen them everywhere…Snap Shots are a great tool that allows you to look at web sites/pages without clicking on the links. Now, you can not only look at these web sites/pages, but you can also bookmark them and share them with other [...]

Today, we are very pleased to announce a new partnership between Snap and AddThis.

You’ve seen them everywhere…Snap Shots are a great tool that allows you to look at web sites/pages without clicking on the links.

Now, you can not only look at these web sites/pages, but you can also bookmark them and share them with other people with just a few clicks. See the AddThis ‘Share’ button in the sample Snap Shot below.

When you click the button you can now bookmark and share the Snap Shot via Email, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, etc:

Enjoy! See you around the Snaposphere!

-Dom

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Voice Dial iPhone App Gets App Store'd [Voice Dialing]

The previously good Voice Dial jailbreak app for iPhone has made its way onto the App Store, complete with $25 price tag. Voice Dial isn't to be confused with iSpeak, another voice dialing app that... Read More

USBTrace 2.1.3.48 (Trial)

USBTrace 2.1.3.48 (Trial)
An easy to use and powerful software analyzer for the USB bus and the devices connected to it

kiued Bookmark Tool 0.1 (Freeware)

Allows easy bookmark queing on kiued.com Read More

Sidebar Bookmark Selector 1.8 (Freeware)

You can choose items displayed in the sidebar. Read More

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Redefining the Widget

Redefining the Widget
Last year at Widgets Live, the announcement of the SpringWidgets platform redefined what a widget could be. At the time of our launch there were three categories of widgets: desktop widgets, web widgets and a special subsection of web widgets that would work on social networking profiles.

We changed all that by inventing a widget platform that allowed for the first time, the ability to use a single, updatable and configurable widget file to reach all of these destinations. We took it further by incorporating in the ability to “pop” any SpringWidget you find on the web onto your desktop with just one click.

Since our release, there have been a few companies that have announced a similar product offering - YourMinis and Netvibes are examples we feel are well done.

I'm going to give you a little sneak peak behind the curtain where we are quietly working on redefining the widget once again, and perhaps in the process spur another round of inspiration.

For the most part, online widgets have been exactly what the limited definition has made them out to be …

A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.

Thanks Wikipedia

Reading this, I’m thinking about the widget landscape and in my head I’m starting to challenge the entire box that we have collectively put widgets into, trying to look past the simple definition and look at the transformative nature of what a portable chunk of code can do.

Is the widget just a visitor on the web page or can it be much more and control and interact with the web page it’s on? If widgets are like parasites, can a parasite define the host?

Can a widget be a portable “experience?”

Envision if you will a Widget that no longer sends the user off to another site to personalize itself. Imagine a widget that is not content to stay within the confines of it’s own little box, but rather can interact with the page it lives on. The “Transformative Widget” would take over the page it’s on; integrating it's content within that page and transforming it based on a click.

If the Widget is not just a chunk of code, but rather a portable experience, imagine the infinite ways we can expand the brand experience within the social network itself. Moving code and embedding Widgets can create a better way to immerse the user in an extreme brand experience. The widget then becomes an ad that is user embedded, user selected and more powerfully engaging and interactive than any traditional advertisement that is available - and just as performance oriented.

If a user allows the widget to brand the entire page, is that a "Widgetview", an "Ad Impression", or a "Pageview"?

So if SpringWidgets is ready to challenge the Widget Landscape it’s safe to say that the launch of THE FANTASTIC FOUR Widget is the next step in redefining the Widget. The transformative nature of TFF Widget is completely apparent once you start using it on your MySpace profile and the brand experience is more immersive than anything possible with a widget prior to the Fantastic Four widget launch.

This is only one of the many transformative widgets that we are engaged in and only represents a small amount of our R&D efforts. Over the weeks and months to come, we'll be rolling out some truly fantastic products that will not only transform the widget, but transform SpringWidgets as well.

We would love to have you on board as we make these transformations, so please feel free to download our API and put your own thoughts to work in redefining what a widget can be.

Adding an Item to Your Queue

From anywhere within Media Manager you can add another item to your queue. Click on the "Add Item" link in the left hand menu, or the "Add Item to your Queue" found on the main Media Manager screen. From... Read More

SimplyHired "job search" widget launched Monday

SimplyHired released a widget on SpringWidgets this Monday (2/5/07) - a SimplyHired "job search" widget!!!!! More will be announced "officially", but wanted everyone that might drop by the blog to know they should go grab the widget and put it on their page or pop it into the desktop launchpad.

http://springwidgets.com/simplyhired



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MPEG4 Direct Maker 6.2.0 Build 212 (Trial)

Convert VCD/DVD/QuickTime/AVI/WMV/MPEG/ASF to divx/avi/wmv/mpeg/vcd/svcd/mp4 Read More

Feed Compare Feedburner subscriber graphs

A large number of blogs and other sites now use Feedburner as it has a number of great Pro freatures and Feedburner also allows you to transfer feed ownership between users. Whilst you can see your stats in Feedburner the graphs are not that great and you can compare them.

There is a site called Feed Compare that allows you to view the RSS subscriber data for up to 4 feeds on a single graph. This means you could compare your competitors RSS subscriber count with your own feed.

To allow you to get a better idea of subscriber numbers you can also view a graph showing data for the last month, quarter, half year, year or 2 years assuming the feed has been in existence for that long.

The reason this is such a great tool is that you can now find out exactly how a sites RSS feed has grown over time. All you need is the sites Feedburner URL which you can get by right clicking on the sites RSS feed icon and copying the URL than pasting it into Feed Compare.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

Read More