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yesterday definitely was “widget-day”, as WidgetsLive, the first conference solely centerend on web-widgets took place in san francisco. of all the talks & product-announcements (read Liz Gannes’ extensive coverage at GigaOM), Fox Interactive’s launch of their widget-platform SpringWidgets (beta) was probably the hottest topic of the day.

while I tend to find most widget-engines quite generic and similar in featuresets, SpringWidgets is unique in several ways: while competing platforms run their widgets either on the local desktop (f.e. Yahoo! Widgets, ex Konfabulator) or exclusively on the web (f.e. Google Gadgets), SpringWidgets’ code can be executed in both environments. widgets like the RSS-reader on the sidebar of this page, can be easily pulled to the desktop by just clicking the green cog (top-left). the desktop-software SpringBox is currently available for Windows only, with a Mac OS-version to follow soon. SpringWidgets integration with several social networking-sites is even better: widgets can be sent to profile pages on myspace, friendster, hi5 and xanga with a single click. as usual, html-snippets are used to get SpringWidgets on any other webpage (see screenshot below).

unlike most competitors which are using some sort of xml/html/javascript, SpringWidgets is based on flash-technology. while this hopefully will bring us multimedia widgets incorporating streaming audio & video, it might turn out problematic since it forces developers to use Adobe’s expensive Flash development-kit. however, this potential handicap in SpringWidgets’ adoption will probably be easily compensated by Fox’ ability to push the platform towards billions of myspace-users.

update: TechCrunch points out that Microsoft’s widget-platform included in Vista will also run locally and on live.com sites.

Mahemoff’s Software-As-She’s-Developed-blog gives a brief overview on eight methods for creating dynamic graphics within the browser. besides more obvious choices like SVG/VML (Vector Markup Language, Microsoft’s equivalet of SVG) or Flash, the post also introduces lesser known options like the Canvas-element (think of a fully scriptable -element - currently supported by Firefox, Safari & Opera) or CSS-based graphics libraries. don’t get too excited though, as most methods are not supported by all browser-platforms yet.

recently launched (MoMB is a bless!) blogmusik.net delivers free music on-demand through a flash-based audio-player. just search for your favorite artist or track and you’re ready to roll. unlike TechCrunch initially suggested, blogmusik doesn’t host any audio-data itself and therefor is not pledged to pay for licensing. so how does it work then? blogmusik either indexes (illegally) linked mp3’s on gazillions of webpages and blogs, or - even smarter - uses the google index to find these files. the flash-player connects to the original sources - voila, no more waiting for the download to finish, free-of-charge, instant audio-pleasure.

this approach is problematic in some ways:

• linking to illegal content - that’s what blogmusik technically does - could be and in fact is treated as crime by many legislations - depending on where their servers are located, this could bring them to court or at least disrupt their google-ad driven income. some might argue, that loading 3rd party-URLs into your flash-player is to be considered more than plain linking (and honestly, I’ld agree)
• any index of linked mp3’s is out-of-date per definition - blogmusik-users inevitably run into dead links (it happened to me during trying it out briefly)
• audio-quality varies among sources. even worse, some sources can’t cope in terms of bandwidth which leads to buffer-underruns

btw, blogmusik isn’t the first of its kind. radio.blog.club seems to have been around for quite some time. like blogmusik, it streams content harvested from all around the web in a custom flash-player. I like the playlist-feature, which suggests other music matching your inital query - think last.fm / pandora on on-demand-steroids

Google Maps Flight Sim is a flash-based mashup developed by Mark Caswell-Daniels. using the keyboard, players can navigate a small airplane flying over digital maps snatched directly from Google Maps. the nice-looking experience is completed by an onboard-cannon however, there is still room for improvement, as the faq suggests:

I have plans to add a building in a user defined location that you can shoot at, after a number of requests from people who want to shoot up their exgirlfriends house / workplace / etc.

(via 3pointd)

SingShot, an online-karaoke-webapp (check this TechCrunch-post earlier today) made me waste spend almost two hours of my evening. basically it’s a flash-applet playing the instrumentals of a chosen song, tele-prompting its lyrics for singing-along on screen while recording your voice from the microphone. SingShot’s community will review and vote on your recorded karaoke-sessions with no mercy. recording via flash works great (including microphone-check-routines). the selection of songs could be larger, and I’m missing a ‘karaoke-stage’ where users can queue up and listen to performances live. after 14 days of free trial, SingShot will cost about 10,- USD per month.

(and no, I won’t link to my recordings )

during the last few days I’ve been diligently working on a web-application in the area of print/typography, featuring a browser-based text-editor with support for various fontfaces. the main problem in realizing such an editor is the impossibility to load arbitrary fontfaces (besides the standards, like helvetica, courier…) into the browser.

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), a free package of javascript, css and flash-code developed by mike davidson from newsvine.com, offers a unique solution for browser-based font-rendering. after loading a normal (x)html-webpage, a javascript-routine selects any number of marked DOM-elements (f.e. all headline-elements). the text-content of these elements is then replaced by flash-movies of the exact same dimension, rendering the text in any arbitrary font, embedded inside the movie. the whole process is instantly finished and runs hidden from the user. another big advantage: if flash is not installed or javascript is disabled, the browser displays all information in a chosen default-fontface. since all text is included in the (x)html-document, there are also no restrictions regarding search-engine spiders.

see sIFR in action: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/files/sifr/2.0/