Our latest prototype, RSS Mixer, is now available. This is by far the most elaborate of the prototypes we’ve been working on over the last few months. All of these experimental applications are part of a larger project that we are developing for release in 2008.

RSS Mixer allows you to combine various feeds into a new one that can be viewed as RSS, HTML, an iPhone page, as well as a Web and Apple Dashboard Widget.

The design is simple: you can create a title for your custom RSS mix and you can add up to ten feeds in the form. A listing of recent mixes, along with a few featured ones, is also included. This prototype (and the others) was programmed using Ruby on Rails.

Each custom mix includes Widgets, an iPhone formatted version, and links to the various feeds in the mix. Below are some links to a custom mix called Environmental News.

Take a look at the site and let us know what you think.

Recently, we tried our hand and developing a Mac OS X Dashboard widget, the Solar Viewer. We built the Yahoo! Widget version earlier in the year with some success–at least as far the number of downloads are concerned. Having developed now for two of the more popular widget platforms (we haven’t looked at Google Gadgets, Opera Widgets, or DesktopX, yet) there are few interesting sites in Dashboard and Yahoo! Widget world worth pointing out. These sites are great for finding new widgets or for promoting ones that you’ve developed.

For the Mac OS X Dashboard there is of course the official Apple Dashboard site, which includes a Top 50 listing. (The Solar Viewer is currently #34, is #20 moving up the charts (updated 11/16/06) between a Tarot Reading widget and one that links to movie trailers.) Yahoo! Widgets has a similar directory although it could use a Top 50 (or some other way of browsing) as widgets get quickly buried on their site.

Mac Update has an extensive list of Dashboard widgets and they actually went to the trouble of posting the Solar Viewer and then emailing us, inviting us to become a developer. Once you’ve signed up as a developer, you get access to tools to track the number of downloads, rating and comments. You can also start an adword campaign to promote your software, which is why Mac Update is so helpful in getting you started. Still, the tools are well designed and the site is relatively easy to use, whether you’re looking for widgets or promting one.

Dashboard Widgets has the latest news on Apple Dashboard widgets directed primarily at the widget developer. However, there is also an excellent showcase which contains over 1,500 widgets for Mac OS X.

Softpedia is a massive collection of software of all kinds widgets included, but I’ve found it difficult to search and to use.

Widgipedia has a decidedly “Web 2.0â€? look and feel and it is “Beta” (of course). The concept is a good one, although it doesn’t get as nearly much traffic as some of the other more established directories listed here do, perhaps it will in time. The site keeps track of the High Rated, Latest Widgets and has all sorts of “viralâ€? software tools for emailing and embedding links and RSS feeds of their categories. The site accepts and contains a variety of desktop widgets; Dashboard, Yahoo!, and even DesktopX ones can be found.

WidgetWorld is yet another widget directory this one is based in the Netherlands. It looks like they’re just getting started as they only have about two dozen widgets. Although, it was nice to see they already had the Solar Viewer in their collection.

Finally, I came across The Flip Side, a well-designed blog for Mac Dashboard widget developers. There’s a number of resources for developers including what must be the world’s only podcast for widget developers. There are also links to what appear to be “widget only” design and development firms such as Taco Widgets, WidgetMachine, among others. Flip Side promises more posts and podcasts soon. We’ll be watching.

We’ve just finished developing version 1.0 of the Solar Viewer widget this time as a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X. Earlier in the year we developed a Yahoo! widget version that works with both Mac and Windows, although you’ll need the Yahoo! Widget Engine to make it go.
Both versions (Yahoo! and Mac Dashboard) show the latest images of the sun from NASA satellites and ground-based observatories. More information about the images and links to larger images are provided. We first collected all of the amazing solar images for the Sun Earth Viewer, a Flash-based interactive that we developed with NASA back in 2004.

If you’re interested we posted a how-to for Yahoo! Widgets when we developed the first version of the Solar Viewer. We hope to have some time in the next couple of weeks to do something similar for the Mac version.

The Dashboard widget should be available on the Apple site soon. In the meantime, you can download it from Solar Viewer Widget page in the Ideum portfolio.

Our latest widget is now available in Yahoo! Widget Gallery. This one displays images from the National Science Foundation’s Multimedia Gallery. The gallery is updated fairly often and the images are a compelling mix of science-related photographs and visualizations. We’re still working on Mac OS X Desktop versions of some of our widgets, the construction is bit more complex than those of the Yahoo!/Konfabulator variety. If you’re interested learning more about Widgets, Kevin Silver here at Ideum wrote an excellent piece entitled, So You Want to Build a Yahoo! Widget.

Yahoo! has just posted our new Widget, the Solar Viewer Mini. O.K., We know it is still a big widget, but compared to first Solar Viewer it is slimmer and who wants to see tiny images of the sun anyway. This version has “drawers” and scrollers to make it more compact. We’ve had nearly 2,000 downloads just today! Our previous solar viewer has over 38,000 downloads in a little over a month. We developed this widget for NASA’s Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum. Both widgets are based on the Flash-based Sun-Earth Viewer which Ideum also developed for NASA.

You’ll need the Yahoo! Widget Engine for Mac and PC to run this. We’re currently working on the Mac OS X Dashboard version of this same widget. We will let you know when that is available.