Elsewhere on the 'Net - W3C Widgets

W3C Widgets elsewhere on the 'Net.
Part of Mobile.

2 December 2009

Mobile Cross-Platform Development: Palm Pre

How to port a W3C Widget to the Palm Pre - or How Palm implemented its own stuff for nearly everything.

Palm, W3C Widgets | Permalink

1 December 2009

JIL Developer Website Beta

Despite the title this site is mostly about W3C Widgets and contains genuinely useful information. Pity it's all in PDFs, but such is life.

Reference, W3C Widgets | Permalink

31 October 2009

Mobile 2.0 – Apps vs. Browser Based Web Services

Good discussion of the difference between app stores, mobile websites, and widgets, with widgets taking the middle position between the other two.

An argument against apps I hadn't thought of yet: reinstalling them on a new phone or after a hard reset is a pain. Same goes for widgets, but at least you could beam them over via Bluetooth from your old phone to a new one.

App stores, W3C Widgets | Permalink

10 September 2009

Developing Widgets for Windows Mobile 6.5

The Microsoft documentation for building W3C Widgets. Differs slightly from the other systems, but that's to be expected with a spec that's not quite finished yet. Contains a few interesting ideas.

W3C Widgets | Permalink

15 June 2009

JavaScript Frameworks within Mobile Widgets - Part 2

Stefan Kolb continues his series of tests of JavaScript libraries on mobile phones. This time he did the TaskSpeed tests on ten Nokia S60 phones.

Conclusion: Dojo again the fastest library; this time Prototype is the slowest.

Libraries, Performance, W3C Widgets | Permalink

8 June 2009

Getting started with widgets on Windows Mobile 6.5

Some information about the Microsoft widget system. Looks a lot like the W3C one, which is good.

W3C Widgets | Permalink

20 May 2009

Web-Based BlackBerry Widgets En Route

Blackberry to support W3C Widgets in the future? Of course this article doesn't give technical details, but the inevitable figure with the boxes and arrows pointing anywhere does seem to sketch a widget context.

Blackberry, W3C Widgets | Permalink

14 May 2009

Creating widgets for T-Mobile handsets

More information about the Opera/T-Mobile widget manager. Something that's not clearly explained is that this widget manager is only available for Windows Mobile.

W3C Widgets | Permalink

Docked Mode for Widgets

A simple and complete introduction to the docked mode of W3C Widgets.

W3C Widgets | Permalink

13 May 2009

JavaScript Frameworks within Mobile Widgets

Stefan Kolb, one of my co-workers at Vodafone, has conducted a selector performance test for seven JavaScript library versions in the Vodafone Widget Manager, which runs Opera Mobile, on ten different Symbian S60 phones.

For now it is clearly visible that some frameworks perform better than others in terms of DOM selection. By far the slowest framework in my tests across all devices was the YUI v2.7.0 framework. The fastest frameworks were the two version of the Dojo framework, with version 1.3.0 performing slightly better than version 1.2.3.

It is also clear from the results that the performance depends on the mobile device. The Nokia N73 was the slowest phone, no matter which framework was tested on that device. The fastest phone was the Nokia E66, closely followed by the Nokia N85.

Hopefully, the tested - well established - web frameworks will soon be optimized to perform better on mobile phones. After that, I am sure, they will be of great value for the mobile widget developer, just like they are for web developers today.

Obviously, we need many, many more performance tests before we can say which library is "best" on mobile phones. Still, today we've made a start.

Libraries, Performance, W3C Widgets | Permalink

This is the linklog of Peter-Paul Koch, mobile platform strategist, consultant, and trainer. You can also visit his QuirksBlog, or you can follow him on Twitter.

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