It's been a while since my last post (almost three months!).  I apologize for this, I've been rather busy.

This post is regarding a security issue I discovered when researching methods of displaying third party websites within a frame in the gadget or a flyout window.  If you don't already know, Windows Desktop Gadgets are built on Internet Explorer technology.  They are actually mini Internet Explorer windows and are subject to the same security settings as Internet Explorer.  They run in the Internet security zone, just like websites that haven't been added to the trusted or restricted security zones.

Being in the Internet security zone, gadgets would normally be unable to perform certain tasks, like communicating across domains with web requests, running ActiveX controls or accessing the clipboard without first asking the user.  In order to get around this problem, gadgets force these settings to allow these actions to be performed programmatically with no prompting.  They do this for gadget, settings and flyout windows and any windows hosted within, including frames and inline frames.

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

We have quite a few prototype/early development stage gadgets here and prioritizing them is a pretty tricky task.  Since there are a lot of gadgets out there, we prefer to focus on gadgets that haven't been done yet, or gadgets that we know can be better than similar gadgets we see out there.  Covering the first of those two criteria is our Magnifier gadget, whilst our Colour Picker (tentative name) tries to do something that's been done, but in a better (read: more convenient) way.

Both gadgets use our custom-built ActiveX controls to perform their main tasks.  For the non-technical minded; gadgets are quite limited in the tasks they can perform, on their own they don't nearly have the same capabilities of a full-blown application.  An ActiveX control allows us to even the playing field against desktop apps, whilst taking advantage of the gadget's small nature and constant desktop presence to beat them with convenience.

Hit the read link to find out more about these gadgets.

The first thing most users will notice when upgrading to Windows 7 is that the Sidebar is no longer present and has instead be replaced by dockable areas on all edges of the screen. The only downside to this is it means gadget's wont automatically re-sort themselves if one is removed or one changes height which can be annoying. This also means that gadgets don't detect when they've been removed from the dock area, therefore all gadgets are in their docked state by default. There's now a little icon which you can click to make the gadget increase in size to its undocked state.

Currently as far as Gadgets go, there's not many improvements, memory management has been improved and some of the 50+ long list of bugs have been fixed, but I've found two that have been introduced (and possibly now fixed in a later build).

For the developers:

The first is that if you have a tag and you don't set the width or height then it won't be seen. In Vista there was a default width and height of 100% but this is not the case in Windows 7 so many gadgets which left that out may be missing a background or have some sort of pink fringing.

The second is that if you set the charset of a gadget in a meta tag in the HTML this will break the gadget. Yep, if you put a tag in that does nothing, it will break the gadget. Even weirder is that if you put in an invalid character set, say ‘blah' then it won't break. So it's actually checking if you defined a valid character set and then breaking. And by break, I mean the code will error and not continue so the gadget won't load properly.

And for the users:

I've submitted both these bugs and both have been marked as fixed so we'll see what happens in later builds. For me the only important gadget this broke was the National Rail gadget, I've emailed the dev and they've forwarded a fixed version to national rail I believe so we'll have to wit and see if they update it or Msoft fixes this issue. It's an easy fix but I can't post it here without getting in trouble.

One area that could be promising is the new Sensor API. The weather gadget has been updated to support location sensors so it's possible other gadgets might be able to access sensor data so like an ebay gadget could only show listings within a certain range of your current location.

Overall there's not much change which is a shame as there's a lot of little things that could have made a big different like flyouts that stay open for example, or larger settings pages.

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.

Hi everyone.

Firstly, I'd like to apologize for the lack of working forums recently.  We thought we'd fixed the bug preventing users from logging in, but it turned out there was another bug still preventing some users.  This was caused by the component we used to synchronize site and forum logins.  The only way around this was to disable the component and have forum logins only.

Due to the forums being out of action, a few critical bugs went unnoticed for Amazon Sidebar Tool, Auction Sidebar Tool and National Lottery Results.  We've now fixed those bugs, so if you were/are using any of these gadgets, follow the links to their download page.

From now, I'm going to try and commit to at least 2 blog posts per month, so feel free to make use of the RSS/Atom feeds.  If I don't get the chance, I'm sure John, Julie or Lawrence would be happy to post something.

Thanks to all our users for your continued support.

Andy