I've posted three new widgets in the Widget Library project.

Widget for Dictionary.com
Widget for Google Reader
Widget for CDC Travel Health Map

I will post three more widgets tomorrow and we have some more good ones in the pipeline, but we/IBM would like to receive some feedback about how to do widgets longer-term. I was surprised to see that many blog readers yesterday. However posting good quality widgets takes time. While the 'development' of widgets is very fast, the documentation, testing, insurance of naming conventions, taking screenshots, publishing them on OpenNTF etc. takes much more time.

IBM has many widgets available internally that could be published on OpenNTF. But not all widgets might make sense to be published to OpenNTF. For example N number of weather widgets, map widgets or translation widgets don't really add value.

Also local widgets often don't make sense if they can only be used in one country. Only if they can easily be mapped to other services in other countries publications would make sense. Other OpenNTF contributors might want to provide country specific widget libraries.

Additionally widgets that are basically just one static URL don't add much value since they would just be bookmarks. At a minimum these widgets should do login where Notes does the SSO. It would even be better if these widgets show information in context by passing in context as URL parameters.

So the idea of this widget library and the catalog is to allow Notes users to easily install and try Notes widgets by just dragging and dropping them onto their Notes clients. The key purpose of this library is to give people ideas about what value widgets add so that end users will start 'developing' their own ones or that administrators create their own ones for their end users.

And just to make sure people don't get me wrong. I'm asking here for feedback how IBM should handle widgets on OpenNTF. Other OpenNTF contributors are free to create their own projects with widgets.



The widget for Dictionary.com (from Peter Wang) can be used to easily look up selected text in the dictionary.

A picture named M2

A picture named M3
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