Windows 7 – Your own Desktop gadget
The fancy UI of Windows 7 has been around for a while now and its goodies makes it fun to work with. While there are lot of goodies you can play with, gadgets seems to be most useful component. Be it checking your system status, a world clock or weather update gadget, all of them are quite handy and useful. But have you ever thought of developing your own gadget, may be useful to track information from various sites (RSS feed). Well its not so difficult to develop one, if you know little bit about HTML and JavaScript. Yes that is all you need to create your gadget, no compilation, no special IDE, no need to learn any cryptic programming language. Just get started with Simple Text Editor and thats all you need as tool to develop one. (Well, to make it fancy you will need graphics.)
So here are the steps to develop a basic version of Windows 7 gadget.
1. Locate a folder “%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets” in Windows Explorer (You can also locate using Run dialog, just enter above text in Run Dialog and press enter).
2. Create a folder “MyShell.gadget” (Note you can name this folder anything).
3. Create a manifest file “gadget.xml” inside the folder you just created now. This is the file which gives metadata about your gadget to Windows 7.
4. Add the following text to “gadget.xml” file.
MyShell 1.0.0.0 Full
5. Create new file “MyShell.html” in same folder And then add the code of your choice. You can include scripts from remote location or you can create your own. I just used JQuery and its RSS plug-in to create a simple RSS gadget. Refer following code.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.0/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://www.zazar.net/developers/jquery/zrssfeed/jquery.zrssfeed.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/jscript" language="jscript">
// Initialize the gadget.
$(document).ready(function () {
$('#rssFeed').rssfeed('http://www.carbonrider.com/feed/', {
limit: 4,
titletag: "span",
content: false
});
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
6. That is all you need to do. Now save all the files and Right click on desktop and choose “Gadgets”. You should see your gadget in the list.
Here is the preview of My Gadget.
For more information about creating Gadgets, visit following site.
1. Microsoft
2. JQuery
3. JQuery RSS Plug-in