Bluepulse Widgets

So of late we've realised over at bluepulse that it's all about WIDGETS. It would seem that some people find the whole portal & remote application paradigm a little mind bending and bent minds are reasonably high on our don't-do-this-to-our-beloved-users list.

And so, we've made the decision to rename applications to widgets. For those out there who know what a widget is it's easy to translate the concept onto a mobile device. For those who don't know what we're on about we can start with a clean slate when describing them, a luxury we don't have when dealing with the associations people make with applications.

If you're familiar with Apple's Dashboard or Yahoo!'s Konfabulator then you'll know that widgets generally tend to deliver a specific bit of content or a particular service. For example, I run Konfabulator at work and have 6 widgets:

1. A todo list
2. An RSS news ticker that scrolls News.com, Slashdot and Reuters World News across the bottom of my screen
3. A Thotbot search
   
4. A World of Warcraft server status
5. Sydney weather with current conditions and a 5 day forcast
6. An IP locator (type in an IP and find out what city it's in)

So this has brought me to thinking about really simple widgets that we could build for bluepulse.
Keeping this in mind, here are a few ideas I've had for some new widgets:

1. Webcam viewer (Just enter the URL of the image and have a refresh option)
2. Translator (Enter a phrase, select its language and the language to convert to)
3. All the 'of the day' stuff
4. An IMDB search

With a bit of luck I'll get my webserver back up and running again at home (I get a BSOD on boot), along with a DnyDNS.com account, PHP (I prefer Cold Fusion but I know PHP can handle image conversion on its ear) and apache.

Project 1 will be taking the feed from my security system at home, which runs into my PC via the composite-in on the digital TV card, and hooking that up as a webcam, probably using the free software from the folks at VisionGS or the like. Then I'll build a bluepulse app that grabs a still so I can check out whats going on... Coooool =)