Widgets

This past week I spoke at the CodeMash conference. It was a really great event full of stimulating conversation. Even more fun than trying to surf in the wave machine was an Open Spaces style session that Kevin Dangoor (creator of TurboGears) and I hosted. We had planned to just sneak off into a corner and turn Ely Greenfield‘s DisplayShelf component into a TurboGears Widget. However, word quickly spread that we were going to do this and everyone wanted to watch as we coded. We had a bunch of fellow geeks huddled around every spare laptop and monitor we could find. I shared my screen with VNC so that everyone could watch what Kevin and I were doing. It was by far the best geek-out session I have had in a long time! Check out a screenshot of the DisplayShelf widget in a TurboGears application, showing a picture of our geek-out session:

Continue reading to learn more about what we built, how we built it, and how you can use it…

This morning I had the opportunity to present at the WidgetsLive! Conference about Flex and widgets. I showed a few examples using Ely Greenfield’s DisplayShelf component. One example pulled in images from Flickr. Check out the demo and the code. I also was thinking it would be cool to throw some YouTube videos into the DisplayShelf component. After a few minutes I was able to make it work with the exception that I couldn’t get the reflection to not flicker during video playback. I’ll need to get help from Ely to fix that, so for now I’ve disabled the real-time reflector. You can see the demo of the YouTube DisplayShelf widget and get the code. I also quickly turned one of the Display Shelf apps into an desktop widget using Apollo. I hope all the attendees enjoyed the session and for those who weren’t there, enjoy the demos!