Adding Slideshows to Widgetop

We enhanced the Add RSS Feeds section to easily add image slideshows to your Widgetop desktop. Just enter the URL of an RSS feed which contains images (e.g. from Flickr or Photobucket) and press the Add Slideshow button:

This will add our new Slideshow widget to your dewsktop:

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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.

Popular Language Translator Widget updated

Our very popular Language Translator widget (#1 on Apple’s Top 50 list for several weeks) has been updated to a new version. Now it translates text between 22 different foreign languages.

You can download the update from here or test it on Widgetop before.

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.

RSS Awareness Day

Today is the RSS Awareness Day. Don’t miss one of our RSS feeds:

• New Widgets
• Updates Widgets
• Top Widgets
• Featured Widgets

And don’t forget to check our RSS widget which makes it easy to read your RSS feeds on your Widgetop Desktop or the iPhone.

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:

New Widget Download: Language Translator

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

This widget translates any text between different languages using Googles language translation service. It can even detect the source language.

Go and download it from here.

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

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!