BRH.numbera.com

In my post introducing the Bungie Card Windows Sidebar Gadget I mentioned that I was making one more gadget that would be of somewhat more limited interest. Well, I’m finally finished with it: the 360Voice.com Challenges gadget! 360Voice.com is a fun little site that started off by giving your Xbox 360 a blog that would summarize each day’s gameplay. It’s since grown far beyond that, but the feature I like most is the “challenges“. Challenges are a little meta-game where you get some friends together and see who can win the most gamerscore via unlocking achievements over a set period of time.

I do a lot of these challenges, so I wanted to be able to keep track of their progress on my sidebar. The gadget shows you the time left in the challenge, the current standings, and the “live score”, which is the gamerscore each player has earned that day that hasn’t been counted in the official standings yet (gamerscore is sampled by 360Voice.com at midnight PST each day). Once the challenge is over, the winner is given a little crown and the gadget waits for the next challenge.

Fortunately, the 360Voice.com developers had the good sense to provide an XML web services API to their challenge data (and a lot of other stuff too!) so it’s not too hard to make cool things like this gadget that tie into their site. For this project I went ahead and included my favorite JavaScript library, jQuery, and a neat jQuery-based databinding library called chain.js. Using these made development a lot smoother - the old familiar Sidebar bugs and Internet Explorer weirdness was still there, but overall it wasn’t too bad. I’ve specifically designed it to be as light as possible on 360Voice.com’s API too, so hopefully it won’t impact their service.

I think this is the most attractive gadget I’ve made - it’s certainly the most data-rich. I’m really proud of how it came out. I hope everybody enjoys it, and if you haven’t ever done a 360Voice challenge, go start one! Also, if you like it, please rate it at Windows Live Gallery.

P.S.: While I was monkeying around with gadgets, I’ve made some minor changes to my Top Process gadget - the text-fade option is no longer there since it really didn’t add anything, and I may have fixed a couple minor bugs.

I suppose I’m a glutton for punishment. After writing my last two Windows Sidebar gadgets, I really meant to swear them off entirely. They’re really a pain to develop. But when my favorite video game developer, Bungie (recently of Halo fame) launched their new “Bungie Cards“, I knew I had to support them. Bungie Cards are basically like Xbox Gamer Cards, but for Halo 3. I assume when new Bungie games get released, they’ll feed into the Bungie Card system as well. My new gadget is not terribly complicated - it just displays your Halo 3 Bungie Card, in either the small or wide form.

When it’s floating, you can choose either form of the Bungie Card. It’s a little weirder when it’s docked to the sidebar. First, it scales down to fit the sidebar. Then, to see the wide version, you just click on the gadget and the wide card shows up in a flyout. It’s a nice way to keep track of things without taking up too much space. As a bonus, double-clicking on either form will take you to your Halo 3 stats page.

Like the other gadgets I’ve done, this was much more difficult to develop than it should have been. The hardest part was getting the scaled-down card for when the sidebar is docked. At first I just zoomed out the page, like I had done for my Xbox Live Gamercard gadget, but it looked absolutely awful. With the exception of newer browsers like Firefox 3 and Safari, “resizing” an image by just changing the HTML element’s dimensions has always used nearest-neighbor filtering, resulting in a truly horrid image. My first instinct was to try and use the MS-proprietary “filter” CSS property to apply a Matrix DXImageTransform that would do the scaling, since that transform has an argument that’ll get it to use bilinear filtering, which is at least decent. However, Sidebar seems to think that that is a dangerous “active content” operation and blocks it. I tweaked it around for a while before stumbling on a workaround - the BasicImage filter was not blocked, and if I applied any transform at all, the basic zoom scaling would filter the image in a more pleasant way. So right now I’m using an opacity filter set to make the image completely opaque. It’s silly, but it works, and I guess this is what I should expect at this point. Trust me, you wouldn’t have liked it before - the image on the left is the way it looks now, the image on the right is with the original smoothing method:

I actually have another Xbox-related Sidebar gadget in development which is more complex but of limited interest. I hope everyone enjoys the Bungie Card gadget - feel free to send me feedback directly, and please rate the gadget at Windows Live Gallery.

I didn’t think I had anything more to do with my TopProcess Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget after its minor update a couple months ago. However, I got a suggestion emailed to me from a TopProcess user that was easy to implement and adds a lot to the gadget. So, TopProcess now allows you to choose between measuring the top consumers of CPU, and the top consumers of RAM. So all you need to do is add two copies of the gadget to your sidebar, and set one to track memory and one to track CPU. Check it out (Firefox users will not be surprised that it always sits at the top):

In CPU mode it displays percentages, and in RAM mode it displays absolute memory footprint values. Remember that some apps (like .NET or Java apps) look like they’re taking a lot of memory, but will give it back when you get low on RAM, so it’s not a worry if they gobble up some extra RAM when you’ve got it. Of course, for most native apps (like Firefox or Photoshop), the value displayed in TopProcess represents a less flexible chunk of resources.

A couple of bugs and less-than-desirable behaviors have been fixed, too. Whenever you change settings the changes will be reflected in the gadget immediately, and turning text fade off and then on again won’t cause text to overlap in a big mess. Also, some of the comments on the Windows Live Gallery page for TopProcess suggest that people have been seeing performance problems with the gadget. I haven’t actually seen any problems myself, but I went through the code and tightened it up a bit here and there - hopefully it’ll work better for those people.

So pick up the new version, rate it on Windows Live Gallery, and enjoy the new functionality.

PS: I was holding this back until my friend could come through with the Russian and Japanese translations, but he’s just too busy and I had to fall back to Google Translate. I apologize if the translations are awful. If you would like to help fix them, or to translate TopProcess into your favorite language, please contact me.

Just a quick update on the Top Process Windows Sidebar Gadget I made a couple months ago. First, I’ve added an option to disable the crossfade effect whenever the list of processes is updated. When this setting is checked, there’s no more smooth fade, but your text is also not bold. I actually prefer it without the fade, and based on some feedback I’ve gotten, this will be a welcome change.

The second change is that Top Process has been translated into 3 more languages. This is the first software I’ve ever written that has been localized, and I’m super excited, even though there wasn’t that much to translate. User Stefano Pirovano contributed an Italian translation, and my multilingual college buddy Mitch provided Japanese and Russian translations. If anyone else wants to take a crack at it, just email me. Hopefully some of my .NET stuff can be ready for localization at some point too.

I guess I didn’t learn my lesson with the TopProcess Sidebar gadget, because today when I got home from work I was itching to make another. This time I figured I could stick to something much simpler. I had looked around for a Sidebar Gadget that would display an Xbox Live Gamercard, but none of the ones I wanted fit the bill. So I quickly whipped up my own.

This one is pretty standard. It lets you set which gamertag to use, and you can drop any number of them on your sidebar. When the gadget is docked, it scales down to fit into the sidebar, but when it’s undocked it displays at full size. Really, there’s not a lot to it. Once again, please check it out at my Sidebar gadgets page and go rate and review it at Windows Live Gallery.