In his blog post entitled Announcing Windows Live Gadget SDK James Lau writes
I am very excited to bring you the first public release of the Windows Live Gadget SDK today! You can start using this SDK right now to build Gadgets that run on Live.com...But as many features as we are adding
to Live.com, the site is still very much a Gadget platform for you
developers out there to build on. We rely on you to build rich and
interesting Live Gadgets that we haven't thought of, and to build a
strong ecosystem around this platform. Live.com is still in Beta today,
but it promises to be one of the most popular Internet destinations
when we launch later this year. You can leverage on the high traffic
site to extend services beyond your web site by building Gadgets that
live on Live.com.
Although we are releasing the SDK
today, the Gadget platform and APIs are still changing. And we want to
listen to your ideas and feedback to help us build a better platform.
Some of the things that we know we need to work on are:
- Unified Gadget model - we want to
enable developers to write a Gadget once and have it run on both Vista
Sidebar and on the web, maybe even in other environments.
- Allow 3rd party gadgets to
change header and footer - today, all 3rd party Gadgets are hosted
within and iframe and do not have access to the title, title icon and
footer.
- Make calling web services easier - this is self-explanatory.
- Better Settings model - there is
no standard way to do settings today for 3rd party Gadgets. We would
like to move to a more declarative model.
- Better Localization model - we
provide API for you to find out the query the current locale but we
don't provide much other support otherwise. This is not a big problem
for most Gadgets, but it would be nice for more advanced Gadgets.
I can probably think of 5 or 6 others, but I'd rather have you tell me what you think are the important things you want to see.
I've been waiting for the Gadgets SDK to ship for a while so I could rewrite my MSN Spaces Photo Album gadget and turn it into an article. Expect to see an article about this from me before the end of next month. Kudos to James, Scott Isaacs and the rest of the gadgets gang for getting this out.