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April 12 AwarenessAwareness
It's been a while since my last update. As everyone knows Life tends to get a little hectic from time to time. When I stop to think about all the different events going on around the world today. My life doesn't seem to be so hectic anymore. With that in mind, I developed a new gadget for us all to remember the many other things that are important in life that we need to be aware of and support.
The gadget above allows you to change the color of the font to match your spaces profile and to select the color you will like to support as a default when a person visits your site. On the front of the gadet, you can hover over the smaller ribbons to see what each color reperesents. By clicking the links on the gadget, it will do a Google Search taking you to the lastest informatin about that cause. The image on the bottom of the gadget takes you to a really cool websites that allow you to design custom wristbands on line. They make the best quality wristbands at the lowest price and have the coolest design tool! So if you'll like to wear your support on your wrist this is the place to go. I'll also like to give special thanks for Liz H. for desiging the really awesome logo in the gallery and the little logo on the bottom of the gadget, she spent a lot fo time making it blend in nice with everyone's unique profile colors. Here's the link to download it from the Gallery: Awareness January 31 My Country
I've finally completed my second gadget, I learned a lot since the development of my first "Polling" gadget, what to do and what not to do. This time going forward with a different design model using XML, spaces preferences for storage, and about 30 cans of french vanilla coffee and hazel nut creamer to keep awake at night. I managed to convert over 200 countries in 9 different languages. Such a tedious task, but with all of this additional knowledge I gained about world currencies and languages, I might not come in last place anymore when playing trivia pursuit.
How it works. When you are editing your profile you are presented with a screen, where you can choose the country you wish to display and your font-color. The background is transparent by design.
The labels are in black and white to ensure, that if you select a font color that matches your background color you will still be able to change your selection. Once your settings are selected and saved. When you view your profile it should look similar to the photo's below.
On the display of the gadget above, it has various links that will take you to Wikipedia, the free on-line encyclopedia. The links take you to the English version of the page, but in the language your market preference is set for. So you can quickly navigate to your language version of the page. The Gadget has built in support for 9 different languages (English, German, Dutch, Italian, Japenese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Spanish) A lot of work went into making this gadget happen, I'll like to give a shout out to a few important people of the gadget community. Who in one way or another helped with my experiences developing gadgets. ToddOS, Liz H., Chris B., Ben W., John B., Greg P. Here's the link to download it from the Gallery: My Country December 26 Gadgets, módulo, Modul, модуль, 组件. モジュールContinuing on with my Gadget Experience.
I noticed that even though I selected English as the langauge type in the gallery for the polling gadget, people from all nations downloaded and tried it out. Some used it, some did not. What I realized, was that a lot of people who didn't use it put in questions like ?????. After, some quick research, I realized I didn't set up the database to store Unicode characters, just western characters. I quickly adjusted the database settings and uploaded a new version. Soon after, people from Russia, China, Japan, S Korea all started creating polls in their character sets. All very cool.
But still, some users after downloading the gadget continued not to use it. I thought to myself, Uh ha, I need to add globalization and localization to the gadget. I noticed that a lot of the gadgets were missing this element and I can see why, it's no easy task converting simple text instructions to other languages. All bow to Windows media player, they did an excellent job with this. I tried using a bunch of different online translation tools. But just like the movie, "Lost in translation", it definitely applies to them.
If you read my previous blog, about my "Stinky Cast" , you would know that my Spanish is really poor. But luckily, I was able to call upon my Hispanic soccer friends to help translate the instructions on how to create a poll into the different dialects of spanish.
Now, if your primary browser language is set to a dialect of Spanish, you will see all the new verbiage. If you will like to help me convert the other languages please do not hesitate to email me at polls@webgensol.com. I have a short list of words for translations.
In addition, I thought a lot about what my next gadget would be, this time I'm definitely not using an I-Frame, since I don't need to supply a complex storage mechanism. I'm not going to unveil it yet, but I have a feeling it will become the most used non-Microsoft gadget of spaces.live.com and it will definitely rival the weather gadget.
December 05 Microsoft Gadgets DevelopmentThe Gadget Revolution
About two months ago a friend of mine introduced and motivated me to design a gadget. Being a developer for over 20 years now and having developed just about everything from small utilities to large brokeage systems. I decided to give it a go and now I introduce my first Gadget to what I hope is many more to come. I'm hoping this is my first and last I-Frame gadget, because if it's not ToddOs is going to scold me.
WebGen Solutions Gadgets
* Polling Gadget First Edition *
I developed this gadget, so people can create their own polls and so that I can advertise a little. The first three people to create a poll on there spaces account, I will personally turn off all the ads on it and enable all the features of it. A little reward for being the first to use it. Now it's time to cross my fingers as I publish it to the live gallery, I really don't know if it's going to behave correctly or if I'm going to have to create a million and one patches to correct it.
My Blue Screen of Known Issues
* Firefox has known issues with resizing I-frames inside of spaces. You're going to see scrollbars galore. There's really nothing I can do about this. Except to reprogram it without using I-frames. Maybe after christmas!
* In IE 6, There will be a vertical scrollbar on the gadget, this is necessary due to a horizontal scrollbar bug
in IE 6. Sounds corny doesn't it? Upgrading to IE7 will fix the issue.
* The Polls use the Referer to work, some firewalls have settings to block the referer from being sent. When this happens the polls will display an error "Please Reload The Site Session Expired."
Comments, Feedback and Suggestions on improvements are always welcomed. |
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