Posted on July 2, 2008 in Widgets and Gadgets by Ben Coleman7 Comments »

A new Google gadget! It’s been a while but I got the urge to put a new gadget togther.

So it’s a weather gadget, oh yawn! don’t we have a tonne of those already? Isn’t the official Google gadget for weather good enough? Well yes and no. I’ve been using the official Google weather gadget for ages but I’ve recently found that it no longer works with locations in the UK! So here’s my take on a weather gadget - it’s using the Google weather API (which is used on the iGoogle personalised site). To use it you simply enter your location as a city in the options - e.g. “London, UK” or “Cupertino”.
The weather icons come for a set on deviant art by JyriK I’m using them under the Creative Commons license

Screenshot of the gadget

Download - New Weather Google Desktop Gadget v1.0.0

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Posted on April 18, 2008 in Development, Widgets and Gadgets by Ben Coleman6 Comments »

I’ve been unhappy with the old Picasa Wordpress widget for some time. I didn’t write it, I merely fixed some of the bugs. One of it’s failings (in my opinion) was that cached all the photos locally on your server, which required you to mess about with directory permissions and resulted in a copy of all the pictures sitting on your server.

I’ve come up with a new version, this fetches the photos dynamically from Picasa and has a few other new features. I use this widget myself on my blog, over on the left you can see it in action (Random Pics)

Feature Summary:

  • Specify a list of albums to display photos from, no messing with RSS feeds, just enter the album names
  • Choose your photos from your most recently uploaded
  • Choose the thumbnail size
  • Chose how many pictures to display

Download - Wordpress Widget Plugin for Picasa Photos 1.0

If you are installing this plugin and you are not familiar with the process, please refer to the instructions over at Wordpress.org. Also this plugin is designed to show photos from your Picsasa web albums, not the photos you have locally on your PC.

Posted on April 3, 2008 in Widgets and Gadgets by Ben Coleman43 Comments »

Another gadget for the Google Desktop, this one brings your Outlook tasks onto your desktop. You can interact with your tasks, add new ones and mark finished tasks as complete.

Screenshot of the gadget

Download - Outlook Tasks Google Desktop Gadget v3.5.1 (more…)

Posted on March 30, 2008 in Widgets and Gadgets by Ben Coleman15 Comments »

This is a new Google Gadget. Bit of a cheeky one, as this is a clone of my Net Meter gadget, but with a different way of presenting the information. The gadget shows a pair of dials to indicate the upload and download speeds, and has a kinds shiny Vista Aero look to it. I could have made this a part of the my original Net Meter gadget as an alternative display mode or something, but in the end decided to make it a separate gadget.

Screenshot of the gadget

Download - Net Meter Dial Edition - v1.6.2
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Posted on March 15, 2008 in Widgets and Gadgets by Ben Coleman13 Comments »

Yes another Google Gadget, a nice and simple one this time.

It’s a notepad/sticky note/post-it/jotter gadget, yes there are already several of these available but this one is different. It allows you to store several pages of notes all in one place. You simply pick the page you want to edit from the drop-down combo list.

Screenshot of the gadget

Download - Multi Note v1.0
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Posted on October 18, 2007 in Widgets and Gadgets by Ben Coleman28 Comments »

Another gadget for Google Desktop! Yeah I seem to be doing a lot of these lately. They are fun and easy to write; and I like the challenge of seeing what is possible within the limitations of the Javascript language and the API Google provide (which is actually very good). My newest creation is a website or URL monitoring tool.

Download - Website Monitor v1.5.0
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Posted on July 13, 2007 in Widgets and Gadgets by Ben Coleman4 Comments »

Yet another gadget for Google Desktop, this one lets you remotely interact with your Squeezebox devices via Slimserver and/or Squeezecenter. It kinda looks like this (well, in the unlikely event of you listening to Venetian Snares)

Screen Shot of Gadget

Download - Slimserver Controller v1.4.1 (For Squeezecenter 7.0 users)
Download - Slimserver Controller v1.4.0 (For Slimserver 6.x users)

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