It was the Friday before TechEd when Peter Ebert and I came up with the idea of having a TechEd schedule widget. Peter had made the original TechEd schedule software that you see displayed all over the conference on the vertical monitors and we thought it would be great if participants could get this information from wherever they were- before leaving their hotel room, in a not-so-great session, or hanging out in the SDN Clubhouse.Fast forward to Monday morning and thanks to a few hours of time from Fred Samson, Stephan and Wiebke (our trusty interns), and the TechEd web team, we had a working TechEd desktop schedule application that refreshed every 60 seconds and highlighted schedule changes, paused if you wanted, and collapsed when you didn’t want to look at it and displayed a thanks message when the event was over. Oh ya, and did I mention it runs on Macintosh as well?
And that’s my point. This is the same technology that you’ve been using all along (mostly XML, JavaScript and HTML), running on Yahoo!’s widget engine (free download), but somehow its more relevant because its running on your desktop. What can this simple but powerful idea do for enterprise usage? I don’t know the full extent of the answer yet, but its what I intend to find out in the coming months. Please let me know what you think.
-Eric
Some usefull links:
Wikipedia's entry for widgets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget_engine
The Yahoo! Widgets homepage: http://widgets.yahoo.com/
The Apple homepage for widgets: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/
