Our This or That widget is already more popular than some of the presidential candidates. What does that mean? Well….. that …. something.

New widget: This or That

Enjoy!

UPDATE: 130 new polls created today. We suspect that someone with some weird obsession made them all, but notwithstanding it is still pretty exciting. Have you made your own poll yet?

In light of our recent release of the VariableLoader Class, we have put together a page to house more code resources, as they come: The WidgetNest Code Page. Right now, you may notice, it only has one item on it, but as we march forward, more will be made available, so check back often, or subscribe to the feed.

As I transition from AS2 to AS3, I find that sometimes what used to be accomplished in few steps now takes more. One of these is the old AS2 LoadVars object. It was pretty straight forward, but now it requires multiple classes and methods to make work. This is not necessarily a bad thing, AS3 is, in my opinion, leaps and bounds ahead of AS2, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all work together to make things easier for ourselves.

So, in that vain, I offer up my first ever AS3 Class - the VariableLoader (zip). It takes all the new steps and packages them in something that feels a little more like the old method. Included in the .zip file are the class, the package directory structure, and an example usage file. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me at dave [at] step7design.com

I can’t guarantee that this is the best, most fool-proof, amazing AS3 class ever coded in the history of the Internet. But I can tell you that for my own AS3 development it has made things a little easier.

A long time ago, I made a little news ticker widget for Digg.com. I made it for myself because I couldn’t find anything else like it. Today, finally, it has been moved to its new home here at WidgetNest. So, be sure to check out the widget that started it all: the Digg Ticker.

‘Facebook fatigue’ kicks in as people tire of social networks | The Register

The above linked article talks about how people are becoming bored with social networks. In general, I agree. The only reason I even have an account on Facebook (the only site I use, even) is so that I can keep up with some of my old acquaintances. Onces we find eachother, however, we can usually take the conversation off the network and in to the real world. Social networks don’t have anything to keep me coming back.

Another part of the article talks about widget developers:

And the “widget economy”, where developers cobble together web
applications in the hope of grabbing their own slice of the riches
social networking’s massive personal data warehouses promised?
Well the business model for RockYou pretty much sums it up. The
startup, that owns the number three Facebook App “Super Wall”, only
sells advertising to other Facebook App developers.

That is why I am glad we do things a little differently at WidgetNest. We aren’t out trying to make tons of money with our applications on Facebook. In fact, last quarter our Widgetbox devshare earnings on Facebook were less than $2. Instead, we are widget developers. We make widgets for other people, and not always for social networks. Basically, we are a web design/development company that specializes in widgets.

Widgets are an intriguing platform, but when a widget is dependent upon some other platform, like MySpace or Facebook, it becomes tied to the success of that platform. That makes the widget vulnerable. A real widget should have its own backbone, its own legs to stand on.

Just updated the WidgetNest home page.

Looks pretty good I think, then again I am biased. Look at all we’ve gotten done and its only February 1st! This really will be the year of the widget, or, at least the year of “WidgetNest gets things done.”

We just added a feature to the timline widget that allows users to stop time! Actually, it just saves the current feed timeline for future reference. This way, if anyone sees something interesting on a particular day - like lots of news about a certain subject - they can save that timeline so that in the future it will remain the same.

Neat huh?

Here is an example using Engadget and Gizmodo.