Closing in on Xbox Gadget 1.1
I’ve been working on this off and on ever since releasing 1.0, I definitely feel like this is deserving of a whole tenth of a full version bump. Quick list of things that have changed so far off the top of my head.
- The backend web service caches results now, makes updating faster (but the data is no less fresh!)
- Expanding in height was retarded, the guidelines were correct. To solve the problem of more than 5 online contacts without expanding there’s now pagination!
- Undocked state exists now, might even be marginally useful.
- Flyout has a link to open up xbox.com to send user a message over XBL
- Error Handling for bad data from the WS
- New background images, no longer quite so boring!
- List updates are animated with a subtle fade effect. Probably needs more tweaking, but I think it makes a big difference.
There’s still a few things left I want to do before making 1.1 official like update nagging and possibly adding a toggle to the settings page to show all your contacts and just filter it so that the only ones are a different color and show up first. Not sure about that one yet, but it’s a possibility.
Look, it’s a SCREENSHOT of the new stuff! Ok so mostly I wanted to play with a Windows Live Writer “Polariod Image” plugin, but it’s still a perfectly reasonable picture. I don’t feel bad for a second about posting it, so there!
One last thing, I’ve given the gadget a “proper” home page at http://patcavit.com/xbox-live-gadget/ thanks to Wordpress’s support for pages and custom templates. It took some hunting to figure out how to make a static page include a list of posts from a certain category, but http://www.transycan.net/blogtest/2007/09/10/static-frontpage-combined-with-dynamic-content/ was incredibly helpful in answering the questions I had.
Oh that reminds me I have to update the homepage in the gadget metadata…
April 19th, 2008