The Flip Side 10.20.2006

The Flipside with John Brown discusses various widgets, including the Google 2-in-1 widget, On Tour widget, Deep Sleep widget, and the Mad Libs widget. The Mad Libs widget is particularly popular, allowing users to create Mad Libs with modern text and replace adjectives, verbs, and nouns. The creators of the Mad Libs widget, Taco Widgets, talk about the challenges they faced in creating the widget and its success. They also discuss the features of the widget, such as the ability to save Mad Libs to the desktop and generate words. The team learned about creativity and teamwork while developing the widget. Friday, October 20th, 2006, episode 22. Welcome to The Flipside with John Brown. Hi, and welcome to The Flipside. I'm your host, John Brown. We've got lots of great widgets to go over today. Some of them have been released this week. Others have been released prior, but all of them, again, really great and cool widgets that I hope you enjoy. We also have an interview with the creators of the Mad Libs widget coming up, so stay tuned for that. Let's just dive right into some of the new widgets that were released recently. The first widget I want to talk about is the Google 2-in-1 widget. This widget allows you to search Google right from the dashboard. It also doubles as an RSS reader. It reads the top 10 stories from over 10 different categories right from Google. So if you're interested in entertainment, sports, health, science fiction, or technology, or even more, you can use this widget in the dashboard to quickly glance at headlines, click on the link, it will automatically open up in Safari to that story, and you can check it out. Again, it's the Google 2-in-1 widget, and you can check it out at www.lexinc.com. The next widget I wanted to talk about was a widget that we have already talked about many times on the show, and it's the On Tour widget. You can find that over at concerts.ontour.net. Now, the On Tour widget offers concert listings for your town. Concerts of artists in your iTunes will be highlighted in the My Artists section of the results so that you'll be sure to see them. It allows you to track concerts for the songs that you like and love in your own iTunes library. It's a really great widget, and they've just updated it to work with computers who store their iTunes library on an external drive. So if you store your music on an external drive and you want to keep up to date with all of the concerts in your area and previously could not get the On Tour widget to work, it works now. Check it out. Again, you can find it at concerts.ontour.net. The next widget I want to talk about is called the Deep Sleep widget. The Deep Sleep is a simple dashboard widget which allows users to put their computer into hibernation mode. Also, this is sometimes called software suspend mode. This widget only works with a number of Apple computer models, but they have all that documentation right there on the website. It's a really great widget, and it does exactly what it says very well. You can find it at deepsleep.free.fr. The next service that I want to talk about is not actually a widget, but like Mooglets, something that we talked about prior on the show, this allows you to run dashboard widgets right in Safari. Now, unlike Mooglets, this is being developed very rapidly, and it's really amazing. They've got lots of really cool widgets that you can choose from, and developers can even post their own widgets to get them listed on the site so that people can have their own widgets loaded into this really cool environment. The service is called the Widget Top. Widget Top brings the Apple dashboard widgets to the web, so you can now create and publish widgets that run everywhere. All you need is familiarity with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you're thinking of creating a new widget or submitting an already created Apple dashboard widget you previously authored, then you can check the quick guidebook that they have right online, and you can see what is required for any changes. You can find it at www.widgettop.com. That's spelled W-I-D-G-E-T-O-P.com. Check it out. The next and last widget that I wanted to mention today was the Widget that is currently in the number one featured slot and also the number one download slot over in Apple's dashboard download page, and that's the Mine Sweeper Widget. The Mine Sweeper Widget is a fun and challenging game for all ages. The object is simple. Click on the blocks and don't hit a mine. When you click on a block, it shows the blank spot. You're fine. There are no mines next to you, and by next to you that means left, right, up, down, or diagonal of that square. This is a really cool widget, and there's a link in the show notes. Really cool. I recommend anyone who has ever switched from a PC over to a Mac to check it out. It brings some of that nostalgia back to your computer. Again, this is the Mine Sweeper Widget, and it's really great and fun. On the same lines of fun, the next widget that we had the opportunity to review today was the Mad Libs Widget. The Mad Libs Widget is a really fun and cool widget that brings a lot of spontaneity and excitement back into the dashboard. I really love this widget because it brought back a lot of the childhood memories that I had growing up as a kid playing Mad Libs, and it's really great for people who have kids because it is a great way to create lots of fun memories for them or simply for the child in us all. The Mad Lib Widget is an amazing widget that lets you create Mad Libs with over 13 Mad Libs to choose from. These great Libs are created using modern day text, and then replacing adjectives, verbs, and nouns, you can create some stunning effects. The design is simple and elegant and stunning. If you're looking for more fun in the dashboard, then try the Mad Libs Widget. We had an opportunity to sit down with the team over at tacowidgets.com and talk about not only their Mad Libs Widget, but their thoughts and ideas about the dashboard and widgets in general, and also about their team. How did they start, and what is their objective when creating really cool widgets? We also sit down and talk with them about their current widget, the Mad Libs Widget. You can find them over at www.tacowidgets.com. I hope you enjoy the interview with the creators and founders of Taco Widgets. Alright, hi. We're talking with the creators of the Mad Libs Widget and the whole team of tacowidgets.com. We're talking with, let's just go around the mic and introduce everyone. I'm John from widgetshow.com. I'm Austin. Okay. I'm the graphic designer for Taco Widgets. Okay, great. I'm Gilan. I'm the main programmer for Taco Widgets. And I'm Nathan. I just do little odd jobs here and there. Alright. Well, it's great to have you guys here talking about primarily your Mad Libs Widget, which has been a really great addition to the widgets you guys have already made. I'm really impressed. I really enjoy it, and again, it's really fun. Really good job. Thank you. What are some of the challenges that you had bringing the Mad Libs Widget together? Actually, I think one of our biggest challenges was actually thinking of the Mad Libs, because we're pretty capable of programming these widgets and making nice graphics for them, but we couldn't really think of things that would be fun to mess around with. That took a lot of time, just trying to put stuff together, and I think originally we had like two of them, but that obviously wouldn't have been enough for a full release. Right. Yeah, that was definitely the hardest part. Okay, cool. And what has been the response to the widget? What do you think? Well, the response to this widget has been pretty phenomenal. It's been one of our best releases ever. Okay. I mean, it's only a dashboard release, but we've seen downloads surpass Yahoo! Widget downloads for the entire year. It's only been a few weeks, so I'm pretty happy about that. Cool. Now, this is only a dashboard widget. Do you guys have any plans to be making this a universal Yahoo! Widget in the future? We may. We'll just have to see how it goes. Okay, cool. And what do you think is attributed to the success of this widget? I guess it's kind of hard to say. I mean, I guess, you know, I used to do Mad Libs when I was, you know, 10, 11, you know, older than that. Right. And it's just really fun, and people just love to play games, and not all widgets have to be, you know, have to be kind of hard. Serious. Yeah, they don't have to necessarily, you know, solve a problem. They can also just be for fun. Yeah, that's true. You guys add a lot of cool features to the widget. Let's run through all the features of the Mad Libs widget. One of the ones that I really enjoy is the feature that allows you to save the widget, not save the widget, but save the Mad Lib right to your desktop, which is a really great feature. What are some of the other features of the Mad Libs widget? The Mad Libs widget can also generate the words for you, the nouns, the adjectives, the surnames. Okay, right. Some people say this is cheating, but we figured it would be fun to include it anyway. Sure, yeah, that's great. Awesome. And how many Mad Libs widgets, I'm sorry, how many Mad Libs do you have included into the widget as of right now? We have 12. Okay. We all wrote a couple. Yeah. Some more than others, as usual. Yeah, and you know, we have plenty, there's plenty of room to update, too. We're definitely going to put more fun Mad Libs in there, and as we come along, maybe we'll, you know, improve some or add new features, so there's plenty of room for improvement, too. Oh, that's very good to hear. Did you guys learn anything new by making this widget, as far as maybe coding or graphics or maybe just being more creative or thinking out of the box, sort of? Yeah, I think, yeah, I think you're right. Definitely just being more creative, because really, I mean, the widgets we've done have really been, you know, about solving a problem and we haven't really put together, you know, a good gaming widget or like a time waster those days. Yeah, sure. Kind of old-fashioned, but I don't know, I guess, you know, maybe we just, you know, maybe we don't have to develop widgets that just fix a problem. We can also make, you know, a fun little, you know, not, I wouldn't say useless, but, you know. Yeah. Just, you know, time-wasting widgets. Right. Yeah. Well, that's great. I think we learned both about teamwork. We had a couple problems with deadlines here and there. Uh-huh. We didn't get out in time, luckily. Yeah, that wasn't a problem. Cool. All right. Well, that's really great. And, again, where can people go and download the widget if they haven't already? They can go to our website. That's www.tacowidgets.com. Okay. And dashboardwidgets.com. Uh-huh. And also Apple's own download page. All right. Great. And going to apple.com will bring you there. I also noticed that this is one of the, one of the staff picks, so it's probably going to be right on the front page. So it's probably going to be really easy to find on Apple's website, so. Well, we're hoping. We want the top ten. I think that, I think we've made it to 13, but we're looking at that top ten spot. Yeah, well, you guys are in the top 50 is still good, though. Yeah, again, really, really like the widget. I'm sure this thing is going to go right to the top. There's lots of really interesting people in Mad Libs, and Mad Libs is sort of a cultural thing. I think Mad Libs is a cultural thing.