Law's Sidebar Gadget Development Blog

Now Playing + iTunes Issues

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:37:00 +0000

Sometimes when iTunes update their software it can break compatibility with the Now Playing gadget for some users but not all.

A user of the gadget, “pancheto”, found a good link for dealing with this issue.

If you’re unable to use the Now Playing gadget after updating iTunes please try the following link:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10176575

Now Playing + Amazon Art Fetching

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:01:00 +0000

As some of you may have noticed the Now Playing gadget has now stopped fetching album art from Amazon. This is due to a change in Amazon’s API a week ago. They now request that all calls to their API be encrypted so any API calls the gadget makes fail.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time to fix this problem so this post is really just a notification to let people know what’s happening.

If anyone feels like fixing the issue feel free and I’ll be happy to credit you and push it out as an update.

Server Ping 1.44

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:29:00 +0000

A very small update to fix an issue with Windows 7 where the gadget would appear off the screen when opened.

Server Ping Download

Now Playing 4.05

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Sun, 10 May 2009 15:55:00 +0000

Download

The gadgets had a few tweaks, since it’s last release a year ago,most of which I have forgotten. A few of the tweaks help improve some issues with Windows 7. If you change the zoom level though there will be a pink fringe and I haven’t found a way to fix that yet.

Windows 7 + Gadgets

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:55:00 +0000

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 <g background> 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.

Drive Info – Windows 7 fix

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 14:27:00 +0000

A while back I fixed a memory leak in the popular Drive Info gadget, recently I found out the gadget doesn’t work on Windows 7 either so I’ve now updated it again to make it Win7 compatible.

Download it

Original DriveInfo

Amazon Sidebar Tool

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:12:00 +0000

Amazon Sidebar Tool is a new gadget release that integrates with Amazon to allow you to search for items, view details, view their pictures, add them to the cart, and then purchase that cart direct from Amazon all right from your sidebar. The idea is to have an Amazon search bar waiting in your sidebar for when you want to check on an item. When you have something to search for, simply type it in and hit enter and the gadget will grow to full size and display all the search results. You can hover over an item to view more details or double click to open a flyout with loads of information about the item including reviews, a list of sellers and a picture browser.

It basically has everything you could ever want from an Amazon search gadget, way better than all those basic search box gadgets that seem to be cluttering up the Live Gallery lately.

If you have any suggestions or issues please leave a comment below or check out the forums.

Features:

Search and view items with detailed overviews, image gallery and reviews
View marketplace sellers for each item and add any seller's item to the cart
Buy items in your cart from the Amazon Website
Supports Amazon USA, UK, Canada, Germany, France and Japan
Choose individual search categories and sorting methods for search
Amazon Sidebar Tool resizes to your liking, just grab the bottom-right corner
Double-click the Gadget frame to toggle mini-search mode

Download

More Details

Server Ping Update

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:30:00 +0000

Server Ping Pro has been updated once again to version 1.95 now with an audible alarm when a servers ping response time falls below the Orange threshold or the server fails. I've also right-aligned all the ping times (when you're not using the LED mode) to make the gadget look nicer.

All current users of Server Ping Pro will be emailed the new update shortly.

Purchase Server Ping Pro

Now Playing 4.04 (beta)

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:03:00 +0000

Download

This version is for people who have trouble with iTunes or Foobar not updating. I've changed a few things in the code that may or may not help, unfortunately as I can't reproduce this issue it's difficult to fix it. If you still have trouble, in the settings there's a new option "Enable failsafe". This option will refresh the gadget every 30 seconds and check if the track has changed manually.

Let me know how things go and report any problems in the comments below.

My T-Mobile gadget updated

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:56:00 +0000

I've just released a small update to the My-Tmobile gadget that shows you your remaining FlexT allowance. The update fixes the gadget after T-Mobile changed a few things on their website.

Download

Server Ping Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:58:00 +0000

I've just released an update to Server Ping (1.43) to fix the issue with some locales who were unable to enter IP addresses and could only ping server names/domains. Download the update to fix this issue.

Also, I quietly released an update to Server Ping Pro (1.8) a few days ago to add support for different thresholds for Green and Orange LEDs showing how long the server takes to respond to pings. To get the update simply re-download Server Ping Pro from the link in the email I sent you.

Server Ping Download

Server Ping Pro

Now Playing + iTunes 7.7

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:33:00 +0000

I've been receiving reports lately from users saying they're having trouble getting the Now Playing gadget to recognise songs they're playing in the new iTunes. I've personally tested NP on my laptop (which has never had iTunes installed before) and it works fine. If anyone else has iTunes 7.7 working with Now Playing could you drop a comment to let me know.

If users are still having trouble I recommend repairing or uninstalling/re-installing your iTunes installation as this has fixed issues in the past when other iTunes updates appear to have broken compatibility with the gadget

Nvision SideShow Competition Reminder

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:28:00 +0000

Just a reminder that the Nvision SideShow competition ends tomorrow (July 18th). The four finalists will receive a trip to the US for the Nvision 2008 event and the winner will be picked there by judges and will receive a Dell XPS 420 computer with a SideShow screen built-in.

I've submitted my entry, Computer Status. It's a combined Sidebar and Sideshow gadget that displays information about things like your ram and processor usage and how much battery life you have remaining or what WiFi networks you're connected to. The SideShow part is very basic as I haven't made any SideShow gadgets before but the Sidebar part is complete. It doesn't require a SideShow device to work however, you can run it simply as a sidebar gadget as shown below. I may be doing some updates to this in the future so I'll be sure to keep you posted on the blog.

Gadget Download

Competition Homepage

Windows Sideshow for Windows Mobile

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:26:00 +0000

A few days ago the much anticipated Sideshow for Windows Mobile application was release to the public as a Developers preview. I've had a chance to try this out on my WinMo device (a HTC Hermes) and i must say it is pretty damn awesome, it only comes with a few gadgets out of the box but it works really well.

Out of the box you can view your currently playing track in WMP including album art, change tracks, play/pause and change volume etc. There's also a great Powerpoint gadget which lets you view your slides and control the presentation right form your windows mobile device. You can also view your Outlook 2007 Calendar, but that's not much use when you already have it on your phone anyway.

Even if you're not that into gadgets, if you give presentations regularly I'd definitely try out the Powerpoint remote .

Get it here

Indexer Status Sidebar Gadget

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:23:00 +0000

Brandon Paddock, who works on the Windows Shell Team at Microsoft, wrote cool gadget that shows you the status of your Windows Search Indexer. It lets you know how many items you have indexed, how many are left to be indexed and you can stop and start the indexer right from the gadget.

Download here.

Is Microsoft serious about gadgets?

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:18:00 +0000

Consider the following:

Many groups within Microsoft have blogs where they talk about what's going on in the group, give advise on programming, etc, but some groups are more involved with their readers that others. The last post to the Windows Vista Sidebar Blog is dated July 31, 2007 and the Windows Live Gadget Blog is dated June 27, 2006.
Most of the top players in Microsoft's Live.com group (the innovators of web gadgets) have either left the company or moved on to other groups within Microsoft.
At Microsoft's MIX08 conference in Las Vegas, I did not hear the word "gadget" uttered once by any panel member or during the keynote.
Code Focus magazine that came in the MIX08 goodie bag focused on Windows Live. There were articles on Live Search, Live ID and Live Writer but nothing on Live.com or web gadgets.
Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 was released not long ago at MIX08 in Las Vegas. During one of the IE8 sessions I asked Chris Wilson, Platform Architect and long time IE team veteran how the new features of IE8 would effect Vista Sidebar. He didn't really have a good answer for me. I also asked him if the Windows Vista Sidebar team still exists. His response was "I'm not sure" which prompted several chuckles from the audience. Some have stated online that the Sidebar team has in fact been disbanded.
Over the past year, Google has announced support for Open Social Gadgets and Google Gadgets Ads. During the same period of time, Microsoft's gadget innovations include (insert sound of crickets chirping here).
And what may be the most telling... there are currently 53 Windows Vista Sidebar bugs listed on Jon Abbott's unofficial Windows Vista Sidebar bug list. Windows Vista SP1 was released to manufacturing and not one of these bugs has been resolved.

See the full post by Donavon West at Liveside.net Here

Now Playing 4.03 (Beta)

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:08:00 +0000

Download

This version fixes the issue where the gadget would not detect when a track had changed in Foobar after the player had been reopened. It also supports editing of lyrics with non-standard characters in the track names.

Now Playing 4.01 (Beta)

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:43:00 +0000

Download

This version contains a possible fix for the issues with foobar. The problem is everytime you change track, Foobar stops the current track and then half a second later starts the next track, so it tells the gadget it's changed track twice (in very short succession) which confuses it a bit, hopefully this version fixes that.

Let me know what happens

Now Playing 4.0

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:45:00 +0000

Download

Now Playing 4.0 is now complete, hopefully I can now leave the gadget for a few more months and I hope you guys are happy with the new tweaks.

Major: Delay between switching songs on WMP, iTunes, Winamp or Foobar and it updating within the gadget has been minimized, it is now normally under a second. This has also led to reduced resources usage.
Major: Revamped skin system with 10 new large skins and 4 new skins provided by TheHobbyLounge.com
Added "Tips and Tricks" page to settings
Localised amazon search results for UK, US, CA, FR, DE, JP
Amazon album art tweaked
Media Monkey album art support, art is now taken straight from MM
Media Monkey track editing (double click on track data when gadget is undocked)
Media Monkey play/pause fixed
Font size settings fixed
You can now close Winamp normally, the quit button has been removed from the player
Lots of tweaks, bug fixes and code improvements across the whole gadget

Note:

If you get a "Not a valid gadget package" error, delete all downloaded copies of the gadget and try again, this error means something went wrong when downloading the gadget.

If the track doesn't change when you change it manually in your media player: uninstall all copies of NP and reinstall 4.0 from the link above. This problem is related to still having the beta installed.

Now Playing 3.9993 (Beta)

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:04:00 +0000

Download

If nobody has any bugs to report on this I'll release it as an automatic update soon. The skin system has been tested on many systems and should now be fine.

Skin system hopefully now fixed

Now Playing 3.9992 (Beta)

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:26:00 +0000

Download

The version numbers are getting a little silly now. The changes I made were quite fundamental to the way the gadget works and they also rely on filesystem stuff so people using XP or non English systems have had issues. Hopefully the gadget will soon be bug free and I can release a much improved 4.0 to the masses.

Skin system improved for XP and Different locales
Amazon locale system now compatible with XP
Quit button removed for Winamp

Now Playing 3.998 (Beta)

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:33:00 +0000

Download

Same as before, if you can, please try this out and let me know if you have any problems.

Bug fix: New skin system now compatible with other non-english locales
Google album art tweaked
Track editing tweaked for when there are no track details

Now Playing 3.996 (Beta)

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:38:00 +0000

Download

Same as before, if you can, please try this out and let me know if you have any problems.

Bug fix: Gadget now detects when player is closed and reacts accordingly
Bug fix: Winamp will not reopen when closed manually, the user no longer has to use close button in the gadget
Bug fix: Font settings now work correctly
New: Skin picker now has categories and 10 new larger skins. The process for adding new skins is improved, you just drop them into a folder in the skins folder.

My Vista Macbook Sidebar

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:19:00 +0000

I thought you guys might like some new recommendations for gadgets that i think every person should at least try out. The last time I did this it was quite popular and is still getting views off Google, so I though I'd give it a try again.

Surprisingly despite it being a year since I last did this I'm still using 3 of the same gadgets as I did before, but I'm now running much fewer

Twenty Four Clock - I'm not especially a fan of the TV show 24 which this gadget takes it's design cues from, but I am a fan of it's looks. I've kept it on my sidebar for over a year mainly because it's easy to read but also because I think it looks good and it takes up barely any space.

Network Utilisation - This very handy gadget gives you a graph showing how much data you're downloading or uploading on any of your network cards. On my macbook I've also modified it so I can click to flick through through my wireless card and the inbuilt LAN.

Computer Status - This is a gadget I put together myself by combining lots of other gadgets I've previously used from different authors into one "super" gadget. It shows CPU usage, RAM usage, HDD usage, WIFI strength (with a flyout showing more details), battery level, recycle bin status, radio with multiple presets, and the date. Unfortunately though as this uses the code from 4 different authors I can't release it. If there's interest in this though I will attempt to contact them and see if they will allow me to release it.

Now Playing Gadget - Like I said last time, chances are if you're on this blog you know what this gadget does. If you don't, seriously, try it now! It shows you details about your currently playing song and retrieves album art and lyrics for them automatically. It has lots of customisation options, loads of functions and is compatible with many popular media player such as WMP, iTunes, Winamp etc.

The Hobby Lounge - This gadget shows you the latest posts from The Hobby Lounge forums and also notifies you of any new PM's via a visual and audio notification. It's a really well thought out gadget with functions like being able to view all the posts in a flyout with links to reply etc. If you want somewhere to talk about gadgets, THL is probably the best (if not the only) place to do so. Also due to the Live Gallery being a bit developer unfriendly, some developers only release their gadgets on THL so THL is a good place to look for new gadgets.

Now Playing 3.99 (Beta)

noreply@blogger.com (Law James) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:06:00 +0000

Download

If any of you guys use WMP, iTunes, Winamp or Foobar could you please try this out and let me know if you have any problems. If everything goes well i'll release this as 4.0 as an automatic update in a few days with a few more skins from THL.

Major: Delay between switching songs on WMP, iTunes, Winamp or Foobar and it updating within the gadget has been minimized, it is now normally under a second. This has also led to reduced resources usage.
Localised amazon search results for UK, US, CA, FR, DE, JP
Amazon album art tweaked
Media Monkey album art support, art is now taken straight from MM
Media Monkey track editing (double click on track data when gadget is undocked)
Media Monkey play/pause fixed
New skins provided by TheHobbyLounge.com