When you make a gadget, it can work on both Spaces and Live.com. Follow the SDK to get started.

Make sure you consider the Author and Viewer modes.

Author mode is when the space owner is in “edit” mode of their space. This is where the space owner would configure their gadgets. Viewer mode is when a visitor is viewing someone’s space. This is also true when the space owner is viewing their space while not in “edit” mode. Gadgets on live.com are always in author mode. There is no distinction between author and viewer mode on live.com. Here is an example of how to determine author or viewer mode on Spaces:

m_mode = m_module.getMode();

getMode will either return Web.Gadget.Mode.author or Web.Gadget.Mode.viewer

Recommendations to make your gadget look better:

• Gadget width - Gadgets on Spaces are only allowed to take up ½ the width of the larger columns on Spaces. Gadgets on Live.com always take up 100% of the width of the column they are contained within. You can test for the width of a gadget by getting the offset width of the “module” class.

var myWidth = m_el.offsetWidth

• Transparency - You may want to set the background color of your gadget to “transparent”. The default gadget background is always white. This works well on live.com but several themes on Spaces have other background colors. Here is an example of how to set background transparency:

if (window.parent != window.self) {

document.body.style.backgroundColor = "transparent";

}

• Spaces themes - Gadgets on Spaces do not have access to the font / css information of the underlying page. It is recommended that you implicitly set a font family and size in your gadget CSS file. It is also recommended that you allow the space owner to set the text color of their gadget in author mode. Allowing the user to choose between white or black text solves most issues with font colors.

The Windows Live Gallery Team

Gallery has a number of ways to help foster open communication between its community members. Success for a lot of these measures depends upon the participation of Gallery community members like you. Rating something that you have tried out is one such example. When you are looking for something and would like to choose from a number of similar offerings, the ratings and reviews that other community members have contributed is one way to help you decide. 

Whenever you try out something, please go back and rate it to help others make a more informed choice. You can do so by going to the details page and clicking on the number of stars in the "Your rating" field. For example if you want to give a four star rating, click on the fourth star. Please note that If you are not signed in, you will be prompted to do so.



Also we have made some updates to the Rating feature. For instance, now you get to see how many times something was rated so you have a good perspective of the existing rating based off that number. You can see this in the “Average of x rating(s)” displayed right above the “Your rating” field

Junaid Basir - Program Manager

We are out with a new release of Gallery! Here is a rundown of the improvements and updates we have made:

1) The Developer Center now has an Overview section to help developers quickly find information on building and publishing items to Windows Live Gallery.

2) We have yet another customization in place for your Live.com experience :) It is called Live.com Collections. Collections are a fun way for you to customize your live.com page.

3) With Windows Vista out the door, there are a lot of new Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets being created. Here is a bit about Windows Vista. You can personalize Windows Vista Sidebar with a host of new gadgets available on Gallery.

4) When you browse, we now only show results that match your default language so you first see items relevant to you. You can of course change this by using the language drop down filter to either choose a different language or all results regardless of language.

5) We have done some tag clean up so the tags area is not as cluttered. This includes removing email addresses and other tags that were not relevant.

Thanks for all your support and feedback!

The Windows Live Gallery Team