Although widgets are built from the same technology that you use to build websites, you need to remember that they’re used on a mobile device that has certain limitations and difficulties. Make sure to keep the following in mind when designing and building your widget:
Provide a loading screen if necessary
Clearly state the purpose and benefit [...]
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I’ve just picked my top three picks for the £20,000 widget prize so I’d like to share three tips for making a really great mobile widget:
Make sure it’s mobile
Your widget will be used when someone is on the move, so it should match that use-case. If it’s not something people would use while they’re on [...]
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You may have noticed that some widgets, while being minimized, display some piece of information on the Vodafone Apps Manager home screen. For example the pre-installed Weather Bug widget displays the current temperature of the set location, and the pre-installed Clock widget displays the current time. This is possible because the Vodafone Apps Manager runtime [...]
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The £20,000 mobile widget contest just closed. I’m on the judging panel and we’ll be announcing the results at Mobile Web 2.0 Summit on June 3rd.
Some really cool entries, including:
More details can be found on Betavine.
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The best thing about mobile widgets is that they’re almost exactly the same as websites. If you’re a web designer or developer, you can easily build a widget.
When we built Twiggy, we managed to build a working version of the widget in about six hours. You can also use JQuery, which makes development even easier. [...]
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Peter-Paul Koch over at QuirksBlog has written a great post about mobile widgets, including some of the ins and outs of developing for the different widget platforms currently out there. Quoth PPK: “Personally I firmly believe that widgets are the future of the mobile web.” We couldn’t agree more!
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Here are a few simple yet important tips when building a mobile widget:
Auto-focus input fields wherever logical. It’s much easier than using the joystick on the phone.
Hover effects are important for usability. Make buttons obvious, because getting to them is tough.
Make sure the phone has your typeface and renders it nicely. Italics might not be [...]
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I sat down on iChat and had a great chat with Blaine Cook, the original developer of Twitter. We discuss the current state of mobile web development and where things are headed. Hope you enjoy it!
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One of the wonderful thing about mobile widgets is that they can also work on the iPhone.
Just add these lines to the <head> of your index.html file:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”initial-scale=1,
maximum-scale=1, minimum-scale=1 user-scalable=no,
width = 320″ />
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width;
initial-scale=1.2; maximum-scale=1.2; user-scalable=0;” />
<meta name=”apple-mobile-web-app-capable” content=”yes” />
<meta names=”apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style”
content=”black-translucent” />
They tell the iPhone how to render the page, what level of [...]
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For those attending the WWW2009 conference in Madrid (April 20-24), W3C is running a special “developer camp” dedicated to mobile Widgets! Attendees will be learn all about the latest developments with (and future of) widget standards and will have access to expertise as they work on their own widgets. Hope to see you there!
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