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You’re probably very familiar with the plethora of widget or gadget technologies on the web or your desktop by now – Vista Sidebar, Windows Sideshow, Google, Yahoo and Microsofts web and desktop offerings as well as a collection of Web 2.0 offerings that it’s pointless to try and enumerate because it would already be out of date.

Well, they continue to spread and Access (the folks behind the NetFront browser which has been doing a great job on Palm and Windows Mobile for several years) have brought a gadget runtime framework to Windows Mobile Professional (aka Touch or PocketPC) devices that they call Netfront Browser Widgets.

Installation and setup on my HTC Diamond was quick and simple. You need to register at the Netfront Browser Widgets site and from there download the installer to your phone (though you can do it over the air I found it easier via the desktop browser)

The installer comes with a couple of widgets (World Clock and Weather) pre-installed, but there are several others (such as the Twitter one above) that you can download and install.

The widgets themselves seem to have a very similar philosophy to their desktop and web counterparts – development will be using standard HTML and Javascript (a subset of the W3C Widgets 1.0 specification) with some javascript extensions to access hardware specific things such as location, power and wireless status.

Unlike many development environments / tools, widgets are fairly straightforward to develop for (thanks to the HTML and Javascript basis) and are also safe – because they operate in your default browsers sandbox they’re not going to get uncontrolled access to your device or data so they’re safe to experiment with.

At the moment although there are some widgets created by Access themselves to get you started the developer information isn’t available, but I imagine it won’t be too long before we see that released and folks start to get creative…

Offbeatmammal (9 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

A geek who's been mobile most of his life - from the UK to Australia and now the Pacific Northwest. I'm an enthusiastic Windows Mobile user (and Vista on my UMPC) - always looking for a better solution to a problem that keeps evolving :)