An update to the National Lottery Results gadget just got accepted onto Windows Live Gallery.  This fixes the never-changing "Loading..." message that you might be seeing on all older versions.

Quite recently, Camelot Plc made some rather large changes to the National Lottery website.  The first thing I did was tested the gadget to make sure it still did and it worked fine.  Alas, it seemed they weren't finished with the site and they later changed the URL for the draw history downloads, thus breaking the gadget (the nerve!).  It was pretty tricky to find the new URLs, the draw history links on the new site are the same as the old ones and produce an error.  Luckily, Google helped out a little bit.

I sincerley apologise for not picking up on this quicker.  I imagine my tests were a day or two early otherwise we could have had this fix out a couple of weeks ago.  Many thanks to Stephen and Roy for the necessary kick up the back-side!

I also tidied the code a little, if any developers or would-be developers are taking a look.

Update: Stephen got back to me to mention that he could no longer choose which game results were displayed.  This was my fault - I messed up the settings page without realizing.  The great thing about this was I caught another bug; National Lottery had slightly changed the format of their draw history CSV files, causing the gadget to parse the 4th most recent result instead of the latest one (eek!).

Download National Lottery Results Gadget from Windows Live Gallery

A couple of updates sneaked onto Windows Live Gallery over the past few days, but I haven't had time to post an announcement until now.  So first things last:

The second of the updates was for Play.com Search, and went live today.  Nothing major here folks, Play.com terminated their affiliate program with Tradedoubler which stopped the gadget from working altogether.  We know there were quite a few users so we made the decision to update it.  The new version uses new links, and some behind the scenes code changes improve efficiency and Windows 7 support.

The first update was for Postage Calculator (UK), which has seen its biggest update since the initial release in October 2006.  Not only are the prices updated for April 2009, but it's grown by almost quarter of an inch to accomodate a new box and it's also sprouted international postage rate calculation and full keyboard accessibility.  Get the full run down by clicking the read link.

Download Play.com Search from Windows Live Gallery
Download Postage Calculator (UK) from Windows Live Gallery