Widgets are back

Finally we fixed the bug, which prevented the addition of new widgets. Thanks for your patience.

Dashboard Widgets in the browser sidebar

Running iPhone web applications in the browser sidebar becomes more and more popular. And it makes sense because the iPhone and the browser sidebar share the same small width restriction.

Therefore we made the little tweaks to optimize our mobile desktop for the sidebar of Firefox and the Opera panels.

How to run in Firefox sidebar:

• Open http://m.widgetop.com?ForceOnDevice and bookmark the page
• Open the properties for the just created bookmark and check Load this bookmark in the sidebar
• You might want to move the bookmark to the bookmark toolbar for quick access

How to add to Opera Panels:

Just click this link.

Dashboard widgets on your iPhone homescreen

We are happy to announce a new feature:

Now you can run single Dashboard widgets from our catalog standalone without loading your Mobile Widgetop Desktop first. This makes it possible put them on the homescreen of the iPhone and access them very quickly.

How To

• Go to the Mobile Widgetop Desktop with the Safari browser: m.widgetop.com
• Just open the Add Widget page on your iPhone by tapping this icon:
• Browse the catalog and select the widget you want.
• Tap the the new Open as Application button:

• It opens a new browser window with the selected widget:

• If you want to bookmark the widget or put it on your home screen just press the little plus sign at the bottom bar of Safari:

Limitations

The standalone widgets on your home screen won’t make your desktop obsolete because there are a few limitations:

• All widgets of the same type share their settings. This means there can only be one instance per widget type.
• The settings for each widget are stored in a local cookie on the iPhone. They aren’t synced back to our server and you can’t modify them from your desktop computer. If you clear the cookies you will lose all settings (You can remove the settings for a single widget type by tapping the icon on the tool bar).

So the standalone feature will be perfect mostly for tool widgets like calculators, which don’t store any important state and need one instance only.

Problems solved

You might have noticed that your Widgetop desktop became quite slow lately. Especially the reload of your widgets (which fortunately shouldn’t have happened happen too often) took much longer than it should be.

We worked hard to find the bottlenecks and we succeeded. Now Widgetop should be again as fast as you expect it to be. Thanks for your patience.

RSS Feeds on Mobile Widgetop

While it is already much easier to add RSS news feeds to your Widgetop desktop we make it much simpler for the mobile and iPhone version of Widgetop as well.

Tap the Add Widget Icon then click the new RSS Icon to open the new Add News Feeds page:

Same as on the desktop version you can search for feeds by keyword or add feeds by their URL.

Adding RSS Feeds to Widgetop

There is lots of valuable information available as RSS feeds. Therefore we decided to make the adding of news feeds to the widgetop desktop a lot easier. Just open Add Widget and go to the new RSS Feeds tab:

Here you can either:

• enter the URL of a RSS feed
• enter the URL of a web site which feed you want to subscribe
• search for feeds by keyword

This will add the new RSS Feed widget with the selected feed to your desktop:

Share your Widget Desktop

You might have seen the new Desktops and Sharing menus already:

We are happy to announce that we added a new feature to Widgetop. Now you can share your desktop and let your friends or even anybody else access it and see your widgets. Of course your settings are safe because a shared desktop can’t be modified by the viewers, only by yourself.

How to share your desktop:

1. You need to sign in to your desktop (or create an account if you don’t have already) because you can only share your personal desktop.
2. Click the Sharing menu (with you current sharing status) and click the Share button.
3. Enter the title, the description and whether you want to share your desktop privately or publicly. A public desktop is included in our desktops directory and can be found by searching for title and description. A private desktop is only accessible by knowing its unique desktop id. and can be further protected by an optional password.
4. Press Save and you can see the links to your shared page on the overview screen.

A shared desktop can be opened read only by this URL:

http://www.widgetop.com/shared.html?page=<desktop_id>

or as the modifiable start desktop by this URL:

http://www.widgetop.com?page=<desktop_id>

Here is the URL of the default desktop (desktop_id = default):

http://www.widgetop.com/shared.html?page=default

By clicking the Desktops menu you can open the directory of publically shared pages:

Similar to our widgets gallery you can find the newest and most popular desktops, access them alphabetically by title or search them by title and description.

Happy Sharing and impress us and all other Widgetop users with your widget desktops!

New RSS Feed: Top Widgets

In addition to our existing RSS feeds for new, updated and featured widgets you can now subscribe to our:

Top Widgets RSS Feed.
http://www.widgetop.com/rss/top.rss.

It is compiled out of the most used widgets by all registered users and updated once a day. You can check it out yourself on the Widgetop desktop with our Widgetop widget.

Please see our syndication page for more details.

New Widget Download: Limits

We just made our new Limits widget available on the Widgetop web desktop and on our downloads page.

Add values until they reach the predefined limit. Use it e.g. to check your the daily calories you eat, your weight or your expenses.

Go and download it from here.

Don’t miss the iPhone version of this widget: calories.speedymarks.com

New Widget Download: Last.fm Radio

We just made our new Last.fm Radio widget available on the Widgetop web desktop and on our downloads page.

Listen to your favourite music from Last.fm. Choose your personal radio stream either by artist or tag.

Go and download it from here.