I have playing around with the widgets now for a while and I have found a few things. The first is that web widgets will run quite happily.
The second is that it isn’t as easy as copying a widget into place and running it. Although not yet. Currently the widgets will only run via the \Windows\riahost.exe which is only setup for 3 – MSN Weather, Money and Search.
I began by taking a Vista Sidebar Gadget as they are Microsoft’s widgets. Simply running them doesn’t work and trying to open then with riahost.exe doesn’t work either. When I checked the 3 MSN widgets I found that they are hard coded into the riahost. This means that you have to replace one to run your own.
Copying the contents of the uncompressed gadget to the \Program Files\Widgets\User\2 folder is the start. riahost lloks for the money.htm so the gadget’s htm must be renamed. Running the MSN Money shortcut now displays the text but not the images. I have been struggling with the images and this is going to take a lot of work on amending the .css file.
I’ve used Sidebar Gadgets, Google Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and they all have this similar problem. This shows that they will run, but will need porting rather than simply copying into place.
Now, Web Widgets.
Heading over to WidgetsBox, I’ve tried a few web based widgets and I’m having much better success. Copying this code into the htm file and using the config.xml and two icon images (.ico and .png) these are running straight away. There is a short delay while the web widget gets the images.
All of the html appears to run under riahost.exe,it is just a case of getting the coding right to run on our screens. Of course Windows Mobile 6.5 will allow user created widgets to run on the device. We are not at the answer yet, but with a little more developers on the case, we should get there very soon.
I think that we are going to see a blend of web and client based widgets when developers start turning their attention our way.
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