Chromed

With their new Chrome browser Google just threw their hat into the ring. Of course we were curious to see how Widgetop would look like:

Not to our surprise it works very well right out of the box because it is based on the WebKit engine (used by Apple for the Safari browser). Google spent a lot of effort to make it the perfect browser for web applications like our Widgetop desktop. It’s really fast because they sped up the javascript engine. Moreover you can easily create an application shortcut which you can put on the Windows desktop, start menu or quick launch (similar to Prism or Fluid):

• Open the Widgetop desktop in Chrome
• Open the menu and select Create application shortcuts
• Choose the shortcuts you want to create

And don’t forget, in addition to your own Widgetop desktop you can create shortcuts to one of Widgetop’s publicly shared desktops.

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Dock Widgetop with Fluid (Mac OS X only)

Quite a while ago we showed you how to integrate the Widgetop webtop into your Windows desktop or your Linux desktop with the help of Mozillas Prism platform. While you can use Prism to add Widgetop to your Mac there is a much better alternative – Fluid. Its current version is much better integrated into the Mac desktop then Prism (but requires Leopard though).

Just download Fluid, run it and create a new entry for Widgetop. You will get:

• A link to Widgetop in your Programs folder.
• Run it and you will see the Widgetop icon appear in the dock like any other Mac application. Just login to your desktop (or create a new account) and your Widgetop desktop is just a click away.
• By choosing Convert to Embedded SSB from the Widgetop menu you can even put your widgets on the Mac desktop itself.

Hints:

• In addition to your own Widgetop desktop you can run one or many of the shared desktops from http://www.widgetop.com/shared.html. Just give them a distinct icon for better differentiation.
• If you want to use better icon you can download and use this:
  

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.

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.

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!