Of Wizardry and Widgets

Today I've been pulling apart some widgets again. There are some amazing ones out there. For example, I downloaded one today that had an extremly simple interface showing the remaining space on my hard drive. But when I popped it open and had a look at the code... blew me away. Several large scripts behind, obviously created by a level 50 or above Wizard! All I wanted to find out was how to gather the informatin on the hard drive, had to scan through lines and lines of code... not sure I've found what I need either!!

After pulling apart several widgets on different things, clocks, network monitors, multi CPU watchers, etc I sat down and started doing some designs for the widgets I want to create for the Uni. So far I'm looking at a CPU watcher, maybe one that can see duel cores, a hard drive watched that, hopefuly, will be able to check whether you are on a university computer (and thus watch the student drive) or at home (thus watching your C drive), bog standard RAM watcher, battery watched for those on laptops, a WiFi watcher for those on a wireless connection, a clock (that hopefully syncs with an atomic clock server and has an alarm) and email checker that will log in to the university emails (hopefully). I was also looking at doing a widget that would let you drag a file onto it and then upload it to your student drive. However, I don't think that it will be possible unless the user is on a uni computer and then it would render it pretty pointless!

As you can see, most features are labeled as "hopeful" at the moment, simply because I just don't know if I will be able to connect up to the servers! But heres hoping!

I have had someone complain about using Yahoo Widgets however because they currently don't run on Linux and who knows when the Konfubulator engine is going to be ported to that! If anyone has any info on that though, please let me know!

So anyway, sketched out a couple of designs on paper today, tried to get them all to fit together, at least the important ones. But I think I'm going to go with a fairly simple layout. Just because not everybody is going to use every widget so I might as well make them all look nice as stand alone widgets. Gona start designing them at home as it's alot easier than doing on my laptop (no mouse and pen isn't too good for this sort of thing). Then I shall start coding them!