Monday, August 25, 2008

Welcome FineTune!

SpringWidgets welcomes it's first third-party developer uploaded SpringWidget.

Only days after our silent launch of widget uploading, Tony MacDonnell and the rest of the team from Teknision have uploaded a Finetune widget, the first on our platform not built internally.

I have to say that I'm really impressed! The combination of a comprehensive music library, the ability to set a 45 song playlist and being viral is a killer idea. I was able to find all the songs that I wanted to add to create a playlist that truly reflected my musical tastes.

The interface for the widget is fantastic and fun. When you have a song selected, the album art is displayed in a style that looks like a row of CDs sitting in a shelf. It reminds me of the very cool "coverflow" effect that Apple recently put into iTunes.

Of course, with the age of songs that I like, a stack of records metaphor might have been more appropriate ;-)

Here is my live SpringWidget, go ahead and play around:



I've added this widget on my personal blog and my MySpace profile to give it a whirl and I'm very happy with the results. While the size of the widget is not configurable, it's designed at a size that fits nicely into the music section on Myspace and almost any blog sidebar.

What does Tony have to say about developing on the SpringWidgets platform? - I pulled the following quote from his blog:

"We've used WidgetBox, Yahoo Widgets, Google Gadgets, OSX Dashboard, and so far the Springbox was the most fun, and rendered the coolest final product at the end of the day."

Of course, the real cool thing for FineTune is that they were able to make it down to the desktop months before Adobe Apollo is to become available and they made it there with SpringWidgets. This begs the question: "were there already footprints on the moon when Neil Armstrong landed?"

We are very glad to have FineTune, Tony and his Teknision team on board with SpringWidgets, and we love the product they have built. Go ahead and give it a try and see if you like it as much as we do!

-Don read more

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