Introduction
What is a Client Side Widget?
A widget is a relatively small, portable application that runs inside a runtime environment. This runtime environment can be a platform running on a mobile device, a desktop or a web browser. A widget has two visual representations:
- Widget Mode: in Widget Mode, the application gets ownership of a small piece of the screen. The widget can indicate how large it wants this piece to be. The size can be 1 or 2 'blocks' wide and 1 or 2 'blocks' high. A 'block' is defined as a 80 by 80 pixels square of screen real estate. In this mode there are typically a multitude of widgets enabled at the same time. For this reason, a widget developer should keep in mind not to use an excessive amount of resources (CPU/memory) in this mode.
- Full Screen Mode: in this mode the widget, you guessed it, gets the entire screen for itself.