Have you ever dreamed of showing rich content on your widget ? Ever thought how powerful a widget will become once it's possible to display rich content like Macromedia Flash (swf), Acrobat Reader documents(PDF), Media files (Windows media, Real Media and Quicktime) and more on your widget to create an extremely rich UI. Recently, while browsing through the Yahoo Widgets Forum, I came across a post which touted a COM component capable of doing all this ! And surely I was impressed. I went on to visit their website and downloaded the component and went to to write a piece of code to display a Java Applet chart. The result was very interesting ! The following piece of code was used in the onLoad trigger of the widget : var WebBrowser = COM.createObject( "CentralTopic.IEwidget" ); WebBrowser.Init( true ); WebBrowser.ShowInTaskbar = false; WebBrowser.Size( 500, 320 ); WebBrowser.hOffset = 30; WebBrowser.vOffset = 10; WebBrowser.Url = "http://inld50047051a/abesh/quality.irpt"; WebBrowser.BlackRectangle = true; WebBrowser.TopMost = true; Now instead of an Image we have a Java Applet that is displayed in the Widget (the quality.irpt file has a xMII SPC Chart Applet embedded within it) which allows us an unprecedented amount of interactivity. The simple WebBrowser4Widgets window : 
Now interactivity examples : Display Alarms... 
Display Comments : 
The API for WebBrowser4Widgets SDK can be found here. However there is Caveat to using this COM Extension for Yahoo Widget ! It is NOT FREE! The Evaluation version has a 10 minute timeout period. And their registration policy is such that the registration cost varies everyday ! However when it was first released, it was released as a free version.
Now interactivity examples : Display Alarms... Display Comments : The API for WebBrowser4Widgets SDK can be found here. However there is Caveat to using this COM Extension for Yahoo Widget ! It is NOT FREE! The Evaluation version has a 10 minute timeout period. And their registration policy is such that the registration cost varies everyday ! However when it was first released, it was released as a free version.
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