Recently, we were contacted by the owner of a popular voucher codes site in the UK.  They were interested in having a Windows gadget to display the latest voucher codes from their RSS feeds.

The gadget has been on Windows Live Gallery for about a week now, but I wanted to discuss some of the non-standard features we implemented to make it stand out from other RSS gadgets.

The most obvious feature you'll recognize is the advertisement at the bottom.  This isn't a feature you'd normally see in one of our gadgets, but was specifically requested by discountcodes.co.uk.  We did our best to make the advert as unobtrusive as possible, taking up just a small portion of the gadget right at the bottom.  The advert image and link will change around every hour.

My personal favourite feature is the scroll bar (probably because I wrote the class for it).  This isn't currently on our other RSS feed gadgets, they (and other RSS gadgets I've seen) split the feed up into pages with left/right buttons to switch pages.  I think that a scroll bar improves user interaction with a gadget, mostly because you can use the mouse wheel and up/down keys to quickly find the information you're looking for.

The third feature I wanted to bring your attention to was auto-scrolling when idle.  This means when you don't interact with the gadget, after a short period of time it will scroll a small amount.  The gadget will continue scrolling at short intervals until you interact with the gadget once more.  The obvious benefit to this is that you can periodically glance at the gadget and it would show you different parts of the feed at different times.

Other, standard features in this gadget include docked & undocked sizes, a search box linked to discountcodes.co.uk's site search and a short preview avaiable in undocked mode.

Anyone who would like to take a look can head over to the gadget's page on Windows Live Gallery.