It seems that Facebook has changed the friends status page and has removed the RSS feed link that existed there. So it’s a bit difficult to find the right url, the gadget needs, in order to display  your friends’ status on it. So even if you click on the link “here” on the gadget you’ll end up on a page that doesn’t have and RSS links. Even though the link isn’t there any more, that doesn't mean that the feed is not there either. All you have to do is: 1. Log on to Facebook and go to your Notifications page:...

I've developed a couple of gadgets and have found that, since installing the latest built of IE7 or Windows 7 the settings pages have broken. From some initial testing it seems as something has changed in the Sidebar event model. What happens is that when handling the onload event of a gadget's settings page, System hasn't been loaded yet (thus the System undefined error). So there is no way to properly initialize the settings page's  html Controls using the System.Gadget.Settings object. I've also tried using the System.Gadget.onShowSettings event from my gadgets main pages to...

It seems that not having to login when you start your PC is pretty important to everyone. I've received quite a lot of feedback asking me to change the login model of the Gadget. So (listening to you) in the new version (available now at Live Gallery) you will have to login just once and after that your session will be persisted even if you shut down your PC. I've also made some improvements on the way the gadget handles no Internet connection (so no JavaScript error messages from now on ;-)). As for some problems regarding...

Well it's officially over. The Greek gadget competition is over and myFacebook gadget took third place. Although third place corresponds to an HTC Touch smart phone I feel a bit disappointed as I believed that this gadget deserved better. The 23500 active facebook users and the 33450 downloads from live gallery kind of gave me hope for the first place. Guess I was wrong hugh? So what I found out once again is that effort doesn't always pay off, as if I left things to chance and didn't call my friends for help, I probably would not even be in the...

Voting has started at gadget www.competition.gr so if you want to help myFacebook gadget now is the time to do it.

Having some free time durring the Christmas holidays gave me the oportunity of doing a couple of things to myFacebook gadget. So except from the necessary bug fixing ;-) version 1.2.1 of myFacebook contains three major updates: First I've removed the verb "is" from the user status as Facebook finally listened to all the users that complained about it and removed it from its platform as well. Remember that you're now expected to fill in the verb yourself. I've also noticed that my friends' status feed contained entries that were a lot older than the ones I expected to...

Today I received an email from yahoo that notified me that its new Vista IM software, Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista, is ready for testing. Of course I immediately downloaded and installed it (as I usually do for anything new ;-)) as I remembered that it was pretty cool when I first saw it at last year's MIX. Once loaded though, I got a bit discouraged, since I found out that I could not login using my live credentials :-(. When I registered, I was able to sign in and start adding contacts, thankfully Live messenger contacts could...

A lot of people have been complaining on not being able to login to MyFacebook gadget and I really didn't know what was going on as I followed Facebook API's authentication instructions to the letter. So I've decided to change it's authentication method. It now uses the same authentication method Popfly uses in its Facebook Data source block. To login you'll have to click on the first page link in order to get an authentication token, then you'll have to add that token to the gadget settings page. Note that if this is the first time...

Wow...two barriers have been broken... I din't see it earlier hut I've broken the 100 blog posts barrier. I guess I missed it because of all the fuss with myFacebook gadget and Popfly screencast MyFacebook gadget has just been downloaded over 2000  times and in just 2 days time... I couldn't be happier... glad you like my work...

Some of you have been complaining about the authentication procedure of myFacebook gadget. Well, don't shoot the messenger... I'm just calling showModalDialog javascript function passing the apikey as querystring parameter to be authorized. Once authorized by facebook the gadget goes to the main page. I'm not responsible for anything that goes wrong on the facebook page. Usually things that could go wrong are caused by your browser security settings so a solution might be to put https://login.facebook.com to your trusted sites zone. Anyway I'm attaching a small video showing off how the 1st login should look like and hope that everything works...

It's been a while since my last post but that's only because I've been working on my Gadget competition project. Some may already know what this was, the rest of you must probably have already figured it out from this post's title, yes it's a Facebook gadget. The myFacebook gadget allows you to bring Facebook right into your windows vista desktop. With it you'll be able to change your status, see your friends statuses, groups, notifications, albums and events without even having to open your web browser. It's probably the largest and certainly the most challenging gadget I've created (so far ;-)...

Once the Greek elections 2007 Silverlight graph was ready, it was really simple putting it to a sidebar gadget. So I've built one and upload it to live gallery (in http://gallery.live.com). The approval process though will take some time and my guess is that it won't be approved in time for the elections this afternoon, so I might as well post it here... Thus if you're looking for a way to have one or more election result graphs right in your Vista desktop you can download the Greek elections 2007 from here, just rename it to Election2007.gadget and install...

I usually check my email boxes before leaving home to see if something interesting is there and today there was. The popfly invite, I had to wait for a couple of weeks, had finally arrived. Unfortunately I had to wait again in order to get to work before being able to give it a go. Once I've started playing with it though,I found out that it was worth waiting after all. Popfly is indeed a great tool for developing cool mashups and gadgets quickly and easily. And although it's rather unstable at the moment (a couple of my mashups did not work...

I’m a huge fan of dilbert cartoon so when I found out that there is a Daily Dilbert Vista Sidebar Gadget I raced and installed it. Why isn't this posted on http://gallery.live.com? Kudos to Quartz…

I recently developed two gadgets for my employer, a Newspaper Stand (gadget showing the front pages of Greek newspapers) and a Custom Calendar that displays information about TV Shows, currently playing shows, events etc. from the Greek portal www.in.gr. The problem I faced during development was that I had no way of daily refreshing the content assuming that the user didn’t turn off the computer e.g. computer was put into sleep or hibernation mode during inactivity. The MSDN gadget development reference did not mention anything that could help me resolve these issues, so I ended up checking manually for date changes...