I've been asked to build 'widgets' that let users of a web application install a desktop, or web-based widget which will provide:
- Notifications of new content.
- Personalized access to key performance indicators
I'm looking for some information to inform our requirements and design discussions.
On the desktop you can target the Vista Sidebar, or on OS X there is the Dashboard, as well as others. From the web perspective you can target iGoogle and others. If I was to start by developing for the widget framework that had the greatest number of users, which would I choose? Does anyone provide statistics on the number of users?
The client would prefer to provide a richer experience for end users and I think this could be achieved using a desktop widget framework. However there would be some questions around the number of users that we can hit with any single framework (eg. sidebar). What technology or framework could I target that gives me cross-platform compatibility? Should we embed Flash?
Rather than live within a widget framework, I was going to suggest the creation of a standalone application. Are there any frameworks that help facilitate the creation of widget-like applications?
Target platforms:
- Windows (Windows XP and newer)
- Apple (OS X 10.4 and newer)
- Linux (nice to have)