A World of Widgets - How to be a Widget Wizard
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So, the walk-through was a doddle, but how easy is it when your hand isn't being held by the friendly scholars of Yahoo? You'll need a working knowledge of JavaScript at the very least, access to and again a working knowledge of Photoshop or another decent graphics program for any pictures you'll need and most importantly, you'll need inspiration. Primarily, you'll want your widget to have the same visual quality as some of the other widgets available in the gallery, with that gorgeous polished black glass effect. Unless you already know how to draw aqua-style icons, you're going to need to learn how to if you want to give your widget that effect.
There are some great tutorials out there for this, and with a little bit of practice, it's fairly easy to come up with something that looks like it should. I'd recommend using Photoshop to make the presentation layer of your widget, not just because it's a great application, but also because once you've drawn your widget, you can use the Widget Creation.jsx script and have Photoshop create the basic kon file that will ultimately hold the rest of the code that makes your widget do whatever it's supposed to do. Once you have this, you can just add in any other code needed.
Once you have the appearance of the widget down, it is just a case of looking through the reference manual to see what XML elements you need to use, and then looking at the JavaScript objects you need in order to wire up the XML elements into a working application. Before I wrote this article, I had no previous experience in creating widgets, and yet now, in just a couple of days, I have a working widget on my desktop that does what I set out to make it do. It's a simple news reader that takes an XML feed from the BBC Technology news website and displays clickable links to the articles on the site (you can see the code behind it in a follow-up article that will be on the Dev Articles site soon). It's not the most complex widget in the world, and it's not the best looking, but it works in the way that I'd envisioned and I think shows how easy it is to get started in Widget creation.
Making widgets is a great thing to do for several reasons. First, it can be a great way to get yourself or your company known to a wider audience by uploading your widget to the widget gallery. There are thousands of widgets on the site and many daily visitors. Second, widgets can be used a catalyst for driving traffic to your site; you can include links to your site on the About page of your widget, and although these won't be picked up by search engine spiders, they may still prompt people to visit your site, and increased traffic is a good thing in anyone's book.
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