The future of mobile: widgets

Vodafone Widget Manager

This article about mobile widgets touches on what will (a long time from now) be a very interesting method of content distribution.

[NB: This guest post is taken from an email one of my colleagues sent me a couple of days ago.]

Mobile widgets, in my mind, will be like the current iPhone apps mixed with databases, HTML, Javascript and XML with cross device/platform support.

The fundamental idea of the mobile widget, is to “write once, run anywhere”, where you download all the necessary files (javascript libraries, xml files, HTML code) in the first instance, then not need to load those files after that point. Increasing load times/accessibility and decreasing net traffic.

The author of the article works on mobile browser compatibility for the W3C and is slowly developing the mobile widget platform.

Something for the future.

Only print specific sections of a web page and save the world

P*ss off advertisers the world over by only printing out the bits of a web page you want.

The oxymoron that is environmentally friendly printing

To be fair I’ve been doing this for years and single handedly saving the rainforests and defending pandas by copying any text from a site I want to read in a non digital format into Notepad and printing from there.

However you often want more than just the text (like pictures) and you've only a big red LED light where your laser printer should have a green LED light for presence of magenta ink and you know that printing all the adverts on a web page will push it over the edge.

So for you I present "PrintWhatYouLike.com, save the money, save the environment, print what you like". Really if I felt they were truly serious about saving the money and saving the environment they wouldn't be encouraging printing at all but I guess they're half way there and "save a bit of money, and a part of the environment" doesn't have the same ring to it.

Thanks to my colleague for forwarding me the link, it's really straightforward; the site lets you input the URL you wish to print then remove page elements before printing, such as MPUs, side bars, removing background. It also works the other way round - you can just select the bit of the page you want and isolate it. Internet Explorer did crash when I tried big manoeuvres when printing my own blog such as removing the background or isolating one blog post. Firefox on the other hand coped perfectly and quickly.

I rarely print stuff and when I do I just do my copy and paste to Notepad trick - plus a lot of sites have print style sheets these days which cut out clutter anyway but nevertheless it's a clever gadget with a good heart. Just remember to only use it in Firefox.

Feedjit widget provides your site's most popular pages

Just stumbled across (in the traditional sense of the word not stumble upon) the feedjit site after checking out this rather interesting real time traffic map.

There's also one of those 'popular pages' widgets that you see more and more on sites these days - see image.

It won't work on every website in the world, the widget has to be able to get the information from your website - therefore it works with blogger, typepad and the open source version of Wordpress (but NOT Wordpress.com).

There's so many widgets out there and most of them are utterly pointless and not even slightly amusing. However there's no doubt in my mind that the 'recommended reading' and 'popular pages' widgets are really useful - it's just another way of highlighting other areas of your site to your users.

The live traffic map may be less helpful but i clicked on it didn't I?!

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