I tested several of their widgets. And they look really good on the desktop.

It’s a little tricky to run Netvibes widgets. But learn these steps below and you’ll get tons of shiny widgets.

• Download UWA Widget from netvibes.com
• Open the UWA Widget or Widget Dashboard Runtime in Kludget Engine.
• Click the i button.
• Enter the Widget Url. Read about Widget Url below. This is the only tricky part.
• Click “Done”. And you’re good to go.

To add another Netvibe widget.

• Right click on a running netvibe widget on you desktop.
• Select “Create Instance”.
• And follow the same steps above.

Widget Url

In their sample RSS widget. They have the following instruction.

Apple Dashboard users: download the UWA widget, install it on your Dashboard, copy/paste the URL of the online UWA widget you want to test (don’t use a local, offline copy), and enjoy.

The URL is actually the link Check the standalone version which points to http://www.netvibes.com/api/uwa/examples/rssreader.html.

To find widgets:

1. Browse widgets in http://eco.netvibes.com/widgets
2. Select a widget by clicking it’s link.
3. Don’t click Add to NetVibes
4. The Widget URL is the link titled Source
5. Copy the Link location and paste it in the Widget URL box

Test the Wired Widget now.

Some widgets don’t have the Source link. And I haven’t got them to work yet.

The NetVibe widget framework looks really clean and stable. They have several cool concepts like Universes. I’ll see if these would run on the Kludget Engine.

Warning: This is a little bit of a technical post.

When a widget is installed by the engine, it will prompt you to grant access permissions. There are a lot of widgets that will require system commands. They usually come in the form of shell commands like:

/usr/bin/id
or
/usr/bin/curl

And these commands are called in javascript through the widget.system() method.

These commands will require linux or linux-like environment like MacOS. (Is MacOS techincally linux?). On windows, we emulate this environment using Cygwin. It’s a linux-like environment for Windows.

Go there.

Download the installer. Choose the packages you need. You’ll need to install a shell package like bash or sh. Installation is pretty easy and straight forward.

You then have to edit the engine preference and check “Run system commands inside a shell”. And point the shell path to your Cygwin shell. (There’s a default sample entry to help you out.)

With cygwin, a majority of widgets that use system command will now run smoothly. But there would still be commands that are available only on MacOS.

The Say Cheese, daily comics widget use /usr/bin/pbcopy to paste an comic image on the clipboard. pbcopy isn’t available in cygwin, so someone will have to port or make a version of that. This is one area where contributors can come in.

In true Kludget fashion, we use cygwin as a component to make the dashboard widgets work. Cygwin is several MBs of disk space, depending on you packages. Do you think it’s worth it? I’m interested in your comments.

One feature that’s repeatedly requested through email and comments is the F12 hotkey. It will definitely be included in the feature list.

• F12 Hotkey – to show and hide the widgets
• WidgetDock – a widget manager widget
• Animations and Effects – not a priority for now
• Plugins – QT-based to make it really easy to create. I’ve sample codes of the dashboard’s plugins, really messy.
• More widgets – include a larger set of default widgets. dictionary, calendar, maps, system stats.
• Linux – because it’s QT based, we could easily make a linux version of the engine. Or even a MacOS version. (Thanks QT and Nokia)

What other features do you think should be included?

The Kludget Engine Beta is finally here. Dashboard compatible,Webkit-based, Nokia QT-based (multi-platform), Yahoo Widget Engine inspired, open sourced.

Kludget Engine – Free

The source may be downloaded from code.google.com, project name is kludgets.