As part of our ongoing quest for excellence, it is our pleasure to introduce to the world Project Naberhackey. Nabberhacky is the code name for our current widget project. What is it? You ask. I will tell you.

We are building a widget editing/management system that would give users total control over their widgets. So, unlike sites like Widgetbox that allow you to configure widgets and embed them on certain pages, we are hoping to allow users to actually host their configurations of the widgets on their own servers as well as provide instructions for distribution and maintainance. The technology behind this is going to be pretty slick, though I must say that this first version will be pretty basic. We have decided to take a very itterative approach with this project as will be rolling out updates pretty constantly over a longer period of time after initial release.

There are two main forces behind this project. First, a lot of our core business has been customizing widgets we have already made for others’ use. We do get to work on some new and different widgets now and again, but mainly people want skinned versions of some of our more popular content. This tool will allow its users to do the skinning easily on their own, then download the finished product. Second, we believe that as the web moves forward, while there is substantial hype about distributed systems and cloud computing, that at the end of the day people are going to want control over their assets. Since users will be able to download copies of the widgets they configure, they have total control over them.

As I said a few posts ago. We are striving to be more open about our work. I hope to have more to share with you soon. Thanks.

Just added a really simple AS3 class to our code page. It is a utility class called “Link” that has one method, “go,” that acts like the “getURL” method so familiar to those that are used to programming ActionScript 2. Included in the file are some examples and the class itself.

Enjoy.

During the week we will be doing some site changes. It might not seem like anything major has changed, but we are restructuring a lot of things internally. If there are short outages, we apologize.

Along with some server changes we are also going to start making some changes to our business. We will still offer our custom-made widget service, but we are going to be doing things a little differently. I can’t say too much right now, but in the coming months there will be some dramatic changes to the WidgetNest brand. Some of these changes will even be viewed more externally, as we strive to be transparent with our business practices and proceducres. As we have alluded to before, we are in the middle of some pretty awesome projects. So awesome, in fact, that they are taking up a lot of our time. We hope to start documenting our progress, in an effort to help others know what it is we are doing.

We have often wondered “what do people do all day?” when we think about all the startups and small development teams there are out on the web. We have finally decided to help answer that question. We will be updating this blog regularly with recaps of the day’s or week’s activity as well as our thought processes and actual work methodology. We are not worried about people stealing our ideas. We are prepared for critique and discussion. This will be a learning experience for us all.

Hope you all will enjoy it as much as we will.

Thanks.

Hello friends, family, followers, and strangers. WidgetNest, in a move to complete some internal projects and development, had decided to go on Sabbatical from client work. From now until the end of the summer we are not taking any new client work. At the end of the summer we should have some stuff to show.

We will try and put updates here when we can. Until then, keep it real. See you on the other side.

Love,

Team WidgetNest

Have you had a change to check out Yahoo! Buzz? Pretty nifty service.

“Yahoo! Buzz features the most popular stories right now, determined by people around the Web.” Buzz is generated by user voting in a Digg-style ranking system. Stories are subimtted by publishers.

Just for fun we made a widget that shows the top stories from the Yahoo! Buzz home page. We are piggybacking on another amazing service, Dapper, to extract the data.

Check it out: Yahoo! Buzz Top Stories Widget

Our latest widget:

March Madness 2008

This was fun to make and it is just as fun to use (I think, anyway, but I am biased.) Check it out and let us know what you think.

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.