WidSets Widgets
I just saw Charlie’s post on WidSets, a new mobile widgets app. I played around with it and I really like what I see. Why? Cause I didn’t have to download a widget toolkit or SDK in order to fool around with it. I was able to sign up for an account online, download the app to my phone, use my PC browser to configure up some custom widgets, and use them on my phone. Very low activiation energy, that’s what I like to see!
I’m sure there’s more complex stuff in there, making your own widgets and whatnot. But I was able to add a Flickr widget pulling images from a tag name that I provided and see it work on my phone right then. Perfect! I still haven’t gotten all the way through the Opera Mobile Widgets tutorials and tried out my own widgets. Instant gratification and push any complexity to be dealt with if and when necessary. I’ll have to spend some more time playing with this, it looks like a great effort.
Two bits of feedback I would give:
- The whole add widget/arrange widget/publish widget/refresh from phone thing is a bit confusing. I thought I had added the Flickr widget when it appeared in the studio thingie, but then I realized it was dragable and I had to move it out to the panel. I get the whole toolwell/main canvas paradigm, but maybe that’s not the right interface for the end user tool.
- How can I publish my widget sets so my friends can pick them up and use them as the base of their config? If that’s in there I would love to see it. If it’s not, it really should be.
Overall, fantastic. Charlie, if you’re listening, go over and congratulate the people working on this for me.
June 8th, 2006 at 11:27 am
mike,
glad you liked it. i’ll tell them.
totally agree on that adding confusion. i need to do it a bit more to understand the logic.
btw, if you click a widget (i think they should call them wids) and go under stting, you can publish it to the widsets directory. but, i haven’t figured out how to have a linnk directly to the widget.
hey, i thought of you when signing up - sooooo easy. and they even have a mobile site for downloading - get.widesets.com.
overall very slick. but, it really needs some interactivity.
have you tried it on more basic phones. it seems not to load on my 3200.
more later.
enjoy!
tchau,
charlie
June 9th, 2006 at 3:23 am
Hi Mike
Thanks for the kind words & feedback ! We too have acknowledged some of the confusions in the usage thanks to the user feedback we have received so far. We will try address those soon to make things clearer and more logical in the site and in mobile too (one tends to unfortunately get “a bit” blind especially with usability issues when working on something intesively for quite sometime).
Cheers !
-Tuomo- from http://www.widsets.com
June 9th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
I’ve only tried it from the 6680 so where, where it works perfectly. I have a 6600 also, though I only use that very infrequently now for some testing.
May 27th, 2007 at 3:11 am
hi.i m facing some problems while loading a widget. moreover i didnot find any link for the site from widget.