Yahoo! came with Widgets, so now it’s Microsoft’s turn to introduce Gadgets. It’s the same idea: little, useless programs you install on your desktop and that eat up your resources. Interesting point: Microsoft Gadgets only run on Windows Vista!
However, Microsoft also has a web alternative: live gadgets. These gadgets are installed and run on your personal start page (as Microsoft sees it) live.com. Today I had to do a bit of a research on gadgets and walked through the Windows Live Gadget Developer’s Guide. In the guide I discovered two little errors, so if you want to play around with gadgets be aware:
- In section “Setting Up Your Environment” is stated: “In order to develop locally hosted Gadgets within IE, ensure that you have set the ‘Access data sources across domains’ setting to ‘prompt’. Inside IE, you can check this through Tools -> Internet Options… Click on the Security tab, select internet zone and click on ‘Custom Level’. Under ‘Miscellaneous’ select ‘prompt’ for ‘Access data sources across domains’.” Be sure that this accounts for the internet zone as well as for the trusted zone!
- In section “Defining Content” a code example is provided with the following line “Gadgets/htmlinliner/htmlcontent.xml”. On my station this only worked with a full address: “http://localhost/Gadgets/htmlinliner/htmlcontent.xml”.
Check my delicious-links on Microsoft Gadgets. Happy gadgetting!