Gadgetzan ahoy!
My efforts in building a Vista Gadget are coming along nicely. Yesterday, I built the script that interacts with the Twitter API. The Twitter API is, in my humble opinion, a very good one. It allows for a developer to fetch a personal timeline (such as available on my blog, in the first column) or to fetch a timeline with friends’ Twitters on it i n a variety of formats. Because a Vista Gadget is actually just an enhanced version of the Active-X Desktop available in previous versions of Windows, a Gadget is just an HTML page. Therefore, the most easy conversion was to fetch the Javascript json version.
I’ve had some other Twitter Gadgets installed, but none of them really got me going. They were too big or too ugly to use.
Mine will show only the most recent Twitter on your “with others” timeline. I still need to add functional forward/backward buttons, a settings page and something that will parse url’s within messages.
And then I’ll only need to add a way to actually post stuff from the gadget. When that’s done, I want to add sound when a new message arrives. And then I’ll have to see if I can do anything about loooooooong lines so that they do wrap nicely instead of breaking layout.
And there’s actually more that I want to incorporate in the little gadget. I want the ability to send you to the Twitter homepage, to either go to the Twitterer’s homepage or to his/her Twitter timeline, I want the ability to display multiple Twitter Gadgets all focused on one person so you can actually fetch a person’s timeline per Gadget. This would be handy if you have a lot of friends on Twitter, or if there’s someone in particular that you want to pay special attention to.
Purpose in life!
