WidSets graduates!!
Wed, 2007-10-24 05:29
The WidSets upgrade yesterday from beta to real service seems to have gone well. Congratulations!!
I guess it's time for to set up a "graduates" section somewhere under Beta Labs...
If you haven't tried WidSets yet, you should. And even if you did try it sometime in the past, you should try it again now. The service has evolved fast, and the widget library - including the "Explore" widget discovery system - starts to look really good.
Comments
Finally the 1.0 is here. Congratulations for the team! I downloaded the new version in the morning and the update went smoothly. My two widgets do not show the latest entries for some reason, so something is broken.
I just noticed that my widgets do update. But for some reason the RSS-entries are showed in a mixed order. Not according to a time stamps.
I find the widget tool (at least 2 weeks ago) a bit to 'big' for my nokie e65. the tool doesnt run smooth and takes a while to open up. Even with the settings to 'lite'. maybe building a real lite widget system?
It works smoothly. I got the Wikipedia widget and it's all there. Very efficient content management, as downloading the required information (in my case, the article on "Nokia") went very fast.
The application takes a while to open up, but after that it runs smoothly on my E60.
Is there already an option for polling widset servers? I explain:
Usually I read weather forecasts and news feeds from widset. I like those to be fresh but they don't need to be in realtime. I'd suggest that devices poll widsets server within some interval to retrieve new data (like email application does) and then disconnect only to connect again user defined time later.
This way we could maybe limit data transfer and -this is more important - boost battery life! We all know how fast 3G data connection eats your battery.. Because of that, i can't keep widsets running background all the time. Data is not a problem, i have flat rate.
Comments?
Jasmo: good point.
When I wrote the "Secret sauce for designing mobile web apps" post:
http://blogs.s60.com/tommi/2007/04/secret_sauce_for_designing_mob.html
...I didn't see the battery life problem.
Have to add it to the list.
A small suggestion: you could add the ability to change the background color. As the default (and only one) is blue, having the option for green, red, yellow etc would be nice.
Widsets is a good concept poorly executed. Why do these need to run in their own environment? Most S60 phones run slowly enough as it is; Widsets turns this trifling sluggishness into aggravating sloth.
It'd be far better if each widget ran natively in S60, in the background, like the Widgets in Apple's OS X.
Can't get widsets to work. N6300/Fido. Says I am not connected to the Internet (?).
exact error message: java.io.IOException: Eror in Http operation
If someone watches this stream -- any suggestion?
"widsets 1.07 not open nokia n95"
The same problem, can you fix it in the shortest possible time?
widsets 1.07 not open nokia n95
Continuing on the keeping-widsets-running-in-the-background idea: I just spent a considerable amount of time reading the Widsets FAQ, trying to figure out how to make my RSS feeds update whenever my phone is connected to the Internet for whatever reason. Or to even have a convenient way to keep Widsets running in the background so that I wouldn't have to restart it every time I boot the device. Apparently you just can't do either, and the FAQ assumes that everybody just knows that.
So - I was wondering whether it'd be possible to have a piece of SW resident in the memory, waiting for the phone to connect to the Internet and then, if there is idle time with the connection, make it run Widsets and update everything that needs updating. Obviously there'd have to be a mechanism for not slowing down the main task that the user connects to the Internet for (typically WWW browsing, I'd presume) - but as said, the system could look for idle times in the connection. This is not a foolproof solution (Widsets could start launching, followed by the user selecting a link on a WWW page, which would be slowed down by the Widsets launch), but still. It would be oh so cool to have all the widgets up-to-date pretty much every time the user launches Widsets.
Also the widget alerts would start making more sense when the widgets would really update in the background. If I'm not mistaken, they nowadays make little sense since the alert only gets played once the user has already actively launched Widsets (keeping in mind the problem described by Jasmo that Widsets cannot be running all the time in the background)
are widsets site down? I cant open it
Have you discontinued widsets? After latest fw update it is no longer in nokia download, none of the Google links lead to e71 client download... If it is not discontinued, you have iaf made it hard enough to install so most users have discontinued using it.
Sorry to be the 1 to break this to you but this is typical nokia: You get all exited about something, promote the hell out of it, only to get tired of it and get excited bout something else.