The widget looks a lot like the recent readers widgets you find from services like MyBlogLog. But Friend Connect offers users the opportunity to interact with their contacts and communities more deeply without leaving the current web page. For example, Yakuel has added a comment widget that lets FriendConnect users who sign up to be members of her blog to leave comments that are visible to other members.
When you visit a site with a FriendConnect widget you can invite your Google contacts or friends from other sites including MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo to join the community.
Yakuel says there are only a handful of Google gadgets available at the moment, but says there is a section where you can grab gadgets from third party developers, much like the gadget gallery for iGoogle and Google Desktop.
Yesterday we told you about a new desktop widget engine called Sobees which is in private beta. We also told you that if you wanted in on the private beta you had to sign up at the Sobees homepage. But Francois from the Sobees team has been kind enough to share 10 invites with Download Squad readers. Just be one of the first ten people to leave a comment on this post and we'll email you an invitation.
Keep in mind, this is beta software. And not beta like Gmail is still in beta. While the widget engine is fairly impressive, it's also sluggish and a memory hog. But we suspect both of these problems will diminish over time. And if you want to keep an eye on the application's progress, and are willing to share feedback with the developers, just leave a comment below.
Update: And we've got our winners. We've turned off the comments for this post and will be sending out the invite codes momentarily. Thanks for playing!
While we often find ourselves thinking "the last thing this world needs is another desktop widget engine," we might be willing to make an exception for Sobees. While we'd forgive you if you mistook Sobees as nothing but a desktop widget engine like Google Desktop, Yahoo! Widget Engine, or Vista's gadgets and the Dashboard in OS X, it's actually much more.
First of all, yes, Sobees does let you load modules on your desktop for doing things like making notes, showing the time and date, or interacting with the web. There are also nifty RSS and Twitter clients, and a web browser with a built in web search feature that lest you sort results by images or text links.
But there are at least three things that set Sobees apart from most other desktop widget applications.
Sobees widgets are highly customizable. You can resize any widget by clicking on a portion of the edge and dragging it in or out. You can also make widgets translucent or opaque, and choose from a variety of options for each widget.
Sobees widgets interact with one another, and you can share content from widgets with your contacts. For example, you can save an item from an RSS feed and share it with other Sobees users.
Your data is synchronized with a remote server, which means you can install Sobees on multiple computers and changes to one will be reflected on another. If you'd like to have a separate setup for your work and home computers, there's no problem though, because you can set up multiple desktops.
Sobees is currently Windows only, but according to CenterNetworks, a Mac client is in the works. An API will also be released eventually which should dramatically increase the number of widgets available. Sobees is quite clearly still beta software. It takes a fairly long time to load the application, it freezes up periodically, and it uses close to 200MB of RAM. But Sobees is worth keeping an eye on. If you want to help test the software, you an sign up to participate in the private beta.
Google seems to be rolling out improvements to Google Spreadsheets like there's no tomorrow. Or like there's no Microsoft Office tomorrow anyway. When you click the little chart icon in the Google Spreadsheets toolbar, you now get a whole slew of charts and other gadgets to choose from in addition to the pie, bar, and line charts that Google introduced a while back.
The new gadget gallery includes:
Tables and pivot tables
Maps and heatmaps
Google web and image searches for selected values
Organization charts
Users can also create their own custom gadgets using the Google Gadgets API. In non-chart/gadget news, Google has also added the option to receive email notifications when someone changes a spreadsheet, and a variety of other bug fixes and feature enhancements including improved sort, filter, and unique functions.
We love desktop widgets as much as the next guy, but sometimes Google Desktop, Yahoo! Widget Engine, or Vista's sidebar can get a bit overwhelming. They just take up so much space hanging out in your sidebar.
Stick is a widget-like utility that lets you add a handful tabs to your desktop to access basic applications. The utility ships with just a few tools, like a News Feed applet, calendar, notes, and Windows Explorer utilities. If you know C++ and MFC, you can also write your own utilities.
If you want access to hundreds of pre-built desktop widgets, Stick isn't for you. But if you're looking for an application that lets you open just a handful of the applications you need most frequently from low-profile tabs that you can dock to the top, bottom, right or left of your desktop, Stick might be worth a look.
With everyone and their cousin busy idea farming for the next monster Web 2.0 social media community site, there are going to be some oddities. And Product Clash, despite the "sounds good on paper" concept, is shaping up to be one of them.
The idea is this: you have a bunch of products like game consoles, cameras, or mp3 players and match them up against a similar product in a 1-on-1 "clash." After registering for a Product Clash account, you can then vote for your favorite item of consumer merchandise by clicking on a link called "clash this!" You can also leave behind comments and blog about the clashes or click an affiliate link to order the item.
Right. But there are some obvious problems. For one, if the site is attempting to break into the comparison shopping niche by disguising itself as a social media site it's in trouble because it isn't any good at either. Besides a rundown of technical data, it has very little information on the products. That, and outlets for fanboys/girls of virtually any product are countless.
The Internet already saturated with resouces on consumer electronics, the future of Product Clash looks like a long uphill battle if not outright grim. Even though it is still in beta, a large problem remains: "clashing" products just isn't very much, well, fun. And a glossy Web 2.0 interface is not going to help.
OS X has its dock, Windows Vista has an enhanced start menu, and Windows XP has, well, a bunch of menus to click through to launch programs. But thanks to independent developers, there are a ton of great program launchers out there that make it easy to bring an OS X-style dock to Windows, or keyboard program launchers to pretty much any operating system.
Over the years we've tried out a ton of program launchers, but we're not sure we've settled on a favorite. The sidebar launchers for Vista and Yahoo! Widget Engine are kind of nice. RocketDock is amazing if you have a handful or applications you use all the time. And keyboard launcher Launchy is all kinds of awesome, if you can remember the name of the program your looking for.
But we haven't yet found one launcher to rule them all. So we turn to you, our loyal Download Squad readers. What's your favorite application launcher, and why? Oh yeah, and don't forget to let us know what operating systems it works with. While Launchy and RocketDock are both Windows-only, we don't want to leave out applications like Google Desktop that are cross-platform.
Google has been offering two different types of gadgets (or what the rest of the world calls widgets) for a while now. You could install tiny applications on your desktop using Google Desktop. Or you could install them in a personalized Google Startpage using iGoogle. Now Google has gone and removed the line dividing these two gadget types: You can now install Google Desktop gadgets on your iGoogle page.
In other words, you can add applications that will let you interact with your computer directly from an iGoogle page. For example, you can play music, or check your PC's power consumption or WiFi signal. You can find the gadgets using the iGoogle Content Directory.
Google is also releasing a new beta of Google Desktop 5.5 with improved Outlook search features and the ability to open multiple instances of the same gadget on your desktop.
Widgets, most people use them now on their social network pages, blogs, or even on desktops. But where did they originate and how did they come to be? Niall Kennedy, the widget guru, answers that in his brief history of the widget.
Where did it all begin? Back in 1981 when the graphical user interface was first designed for home use. Netscape pushed the widget along its journey in 1996 with the Navigator browser and PowerStart. This Netscape technology showed the latest stock quotes, weather and started using other dynamic web content. It wasn't until 2003 when Konfabulator hit the scene to bring OSX users fancy desktop widgets.
Now we have handy widgets everywhere, and they are such common place on everything from mobile devices, desktops, and websites. Niall has also created a widget timeline available here.
Google has rolled out a new beta feature for its iGoogle personalized homepage. PubSub (short for Publisher/Subscriber) is basically a new framework that allows iGoogle gadgets to communicate with one another.
For example, if you've got a search box in one gadget, you can type a query that will affect the results in other gadget. So if you've got a news gadget, a maps gadget, and a calendar gadget all connected to that search bar, you could pull up relevant news, locations, and appointments.
This won't work with all iGoogle gadgets, just those that have been built to take advantage of PubSub. And they'll have to be installed on the same page. You can't have a gadget on one page or iGoogle tab interact with a gadget on another page or tab.
Ryan from Cybernet tagged us, so now we have to come up with 5 suggestions for improving the Opera web browser. There are a lot of things to love about Opera. The company makes one of the finest mobile web browsers around. And the desktop version renders pages quickly and has a great fit-to-screen feature. But there are some web pages that still don't work properly in Firefox.
In no particular order, here are 5 things that would make Opera a better browser:
Opera added tabs long before Internet Explorer. That's great. But when you've only got one window open, the tab toolbar takes up more screen space than you need. Why not make tabs work the same way as they do in Firefox. The toolbar only pops up when you open your second tab.
Why do we have to visit the Opera website every time a new version is released. There should be an auto-updater.
Support for 3rd party add-ons/extensions
An integrated spell-checker
Integrate widgets more tightly with the browser experience. Not that we really need widgets anchored to the browser, but the way Opera handles widgets now, they're pretty much just like Yahoo Widgets or Vista Gadgets running in the background.
We know, being responsible is just so, hard. Electronics which run the nifty software we cover and love contain some nasty stuff that's not so friendly for the environment when left to rot in a landfill. So what's a gadget oving geek to do? Recycle.
By the way, DIY Life posts all sorts of nifty tips, tech related and not so tech related. If you've got a hankerin' to get your tinker on, check 'em out and find some weekend projects.
Google introduced a set of themes for your personalized homepage (or iGoogle) a few months back. But if you're looking for a few more customization options, check out this new Google gadget.
Once you install the gadget on your homepage, you can choose from a variety of custom skins, create your own, or submit themes for other users to install.
Some of the skins change the graphic behind the search bar at the top of your page and not much else, while others give your entire page a new look. Future version of the gadget will include a built-in skin editor.
Google has added in Mapplets to Google Maps today. It was previously offered in a preview mode. Mapplets are like mini applications that can be embedded into the Google Maps site.
Google currently has standard Mapplets available including Real Estate Search, Photos, Gas Prices, Distance Measurement tool, Earth as Art, and Crop Circles. Mapplets are essentially Google Gadgets that can work with Google Maps using Flash or Javascript and the API's.
Google Mapplets can be found under the "My Maps" tab. Additional mapping gadgets can also be added to user profiles. These include some interesting ones as Famous Photos, Earthquake search, Chicago Transit, and Flickr photos.
It's a widget gadget world, so why not add a few more mini helpers on your desktop. Yourminis, who is highly known as a destination to go for widgets that can be easily added to personal websites and blogs, has entered the desktop marketplace. Are they waging some kind of war against Google Desktop sidebar and gadgets, Apple widgets, and the new Yahoo Widgets? I think they are merely providing an alternative.
Yourminis desktop is built off of the newly released Adobe Apollo platform, which could have the potential of being as popular as Flash. Whether you like it or not, Yourminis desktop widgets does require users to have the Apollo runtime installed to use the widgets. Once downloaded, the widgets work as well as they do online care of the desktop widget manager. Are they better than the offerings from Google or Yahoo? They can hold their own; if you can get past the thought of an additional runtime install. It is great however, to see another company supporting Adobe's Apollo web desktop environment, and pushing its limits.
Yourminis desktop widgets come in every shade you would expect them to, from RSS feeds, text editors, stock trackers, and weather reports. They also run on both Mac and Windows Operating systems.
