Tip, Finding out user idleness.

When the user is not currently at the computer it can be a good idea to ignore some functions. You can find out if the user is in idle state with a framework method, framework.system.user.idle. That method will return a Boolean value, true or false. If the user is idle it'll return true.

For example:

if(framework.system.user.idle)
{
//The user is in idle state
}
else
{
//The user is not in idle state
}

To access elements and childs from Javascript to your XML

You'll probably already know how to access an element from Javascript, By it's name. But what if you added a dynamic elements from Javascript and then wanted to access them all again? One by one, by the names? Sounds harsh. The solution is to loop through the all. This can be done in several ways but I'm going to show you one.
If you have a combobox in your gadget and add dynamic items and labels to it by the method appendString. It's impossible then to access them by name as they don't have one yet. But imagine this, we write a combobox in the XML file like this:

<combobox name="cb"
height="100" width="125"
itemWidth="100%"
itemHeight="16"
maxDroplistItems="5"
type="droplist">
</combobox>

Then we fill the combobox with items containing labels from javascript coding:

for(var i = 0; i < array.length; i++)
{
cb.appendString(array[i].name);
}

An array with names will be filling the combobox here, the result in xml would look like this:

<item>
<label>Name 1</label>
</item>
<item>
<label>Name 2</label>
</item>...

Now, how do we do if we want to put a property to the labels, lets say a different size? By this, from javascript again:

for(var i = 0; i < cb.children.count; i++)
{
element = cb.children.item(i).children.item(0);
element.size = 7;
}

By the children property we can access all elements to the combobox and then access that particular item. You see you have to first get the children of the combobox and that are the <item> elements, from there we have to access their children and they are the <label> elements. There are other ways to access elements in the XML file from javascript, this was one way. Instead of writing item(i) or item(0) you can access a child by it's name by writing the name instead item("childName"). Also you can use the enumerator object.

Making your gadget interactive with the web

Offline gadgets are cool but sometimes you may want to interact the web with your gadget, request or send data to and from your gadget to some server. Gadgets can be very powerful with some simple Ajax functionality. With the XMLHttpRequest (XHR) object this can make it all possible. It's not hard to implement and neither to use.

I'm not going to explaine how it works, there is a very well written article to be found here explaining what it does and how, code snippets to use.

Tip, Turning off Windows Vista Indexing Service

If you use Windows XP or Windows Vista you may want to turn off the index service to tweak your performance. Whether or not, if you are going to use Google Desktop turning off Vista indexing service might be a good idea as you use the Google Desktop search and the Windows Vista desktop search will continue to work anyway. It just needs to crawl through everything and it all takes a longer time but probably worth the performance gain you'll get by turning it off. You can do this by several ways. 2 ways are,

• By right clicking on your hard drivers and uncheck the boxes "Index this drive for faster searching".
  
• Turning off the indexing service. Open run and type in "services.msc" Then disable the service named "Windows Search".