To create your first button, you can use the Windows Live Gallery custom button creation page located here

http://gallery.live.com/createcustombutton.aspx

It steps the user through some easy steps to create a basic custom button that can have RSS feeds, shortcuts, searches and a menu of links. When you create the button, you will then have the option to add the button to your toolbar, download the button package and/ or share the button with others in the Windows Live Gallery. I recommend that you first add the button to your toolbar to see what you have created.

Custom buttons are defined by an XML file with one or more icon files. Your custom button will appear on the rightmost of the Toolbar. To see the XML used to generate the button, you can look in the following directory on your computer

C:\Documents and Settings\your user name\Application Data\Microsoft\WLTB Custom Buttons 

You will find a folder for each of your custom buttons, for example the folder “microsoft.msn.mymsn.btn” contains the XML file and image for the MSN button. You can also view the folder containing your button and look at the XML file for the button. Using the Windows Live Toolbar Custom Button SDK located below you can learn how to create more advanced buttons.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa738787.aspx

With the SDK, you can learn how to edit the XML file associated with your button to change its behavior. One of my favorite features is the ability to add a “buttonWindow” which will allow you to  create a dropdown of any webpage in the window. This can be especially helpful to get a quick glance of a website that you browse often without navigating in your current page. There are a lot of other cool features that are supported by custom buttons, check out the SDK for more information.

- Shannon Westphal, Windows Live Toolbar Program Manager

Our team recently released a series of Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets with the help of Donovan West  from LiveGadgets.net. These visually appealing gadgets provide a friction-free desktop mechanism for keeping users engaged and up to date with our latest content on Channel 8, Channel 9, Channel 10, TechNet Edge, and Mix Online.

 

Features:

·         Automatic rotation of latest articles on the site allows you to quickly see what’s new and keep up to date without opening a browser

·         Read articles and view videos right on your desktop or navigate directly to the post

·         Gadgets works with both Silverlight 1.0 as well as the beta

·         Users get a friendly error when attempting to use the gadget in 64bit mode. If users prefer to use this in 64 bit environment they can use this workaround.

 

These gadgets are available on the Windows Live Gallery:

·         Channel 9

·         Channel 10

·         TechNet Edge

·         Channel 8

·         Mix Online

 

We would love to get feedback and reports of any issues which can be sent to us at evnetbug@microsoft.com .

Gallery is pleased to announce that we now offer customizable Messenger display pictures! We’ve joined with a few Gold tier partners to bring you more premium content, including winks.

In some cases, you’ll need Microsoft Points to purchase the new premium content. Don’t have Microsoft Points? Just click Buy when you’ve found the item you want, and you’ll have the opportunity to buy some Microsoft Points. After your purchase, you’ll be able to add your new custom display picture to Messenger and find a record of it in your Gallery purchase history.

Check out our new stores focused on each of our three Gold partners:

• The LOL Family brings you 3-D display pictures, emoticons, and backgrounds.
• MyShow offers a wide variety of customizable display pictures.
• WeeWorld has over 50 free winks to share with you 

Hope you enjoy!

- Katarina and the rest of the Windows Live Gallery Team

The Windows Live Gallery team is excited to announce a new promotion - submit a “Holiday-themed” Messenger emoticon, display picture, or background, and your item may be featured in Gallery. If you’re feeling really creative, you can submit a pack of all three for some special recognition.  So get with the Holiday spirit - here’s what need to know before you enter:

How to enter

• Entries must be submitted between November 19, 2007 and December 11, 2007. The promotion will close December 11, 2007 at 5:00 PM (PST)
• You may submit the following items: animated or static emoticons, static backgrounds, or static display pictures. To be eligible for special recognition (theme pack winner), you need to submit a pack of all three items. If you can’t submit all three, just submit as many as you can - you’ll still be eligible for awards.
• Already have a Holiday-themed item you want to submit?  Please make sure that you select "English" so that you'll be eligible for this promotion - good luck!

Rules

• Only Messenger emoticons, display pictures, or backgrounds may be submitted.
• All entrants need to have a Windows Live passport account (or sign up for one).
• Note: Microsoft and Gold Partners aren’t eligible for this promotion.

Awards
There are two levels of awards:

• a theme-packed winner will get his/her items prominently featured on Gallery’s Messenger page. He/she will also become featured contributors in the "feature contributors" section with special silver tier badge displayed in his/her profile page.
• We will select 1 item for each of the available item types (Messenger emoticons, display pictures, backgrounds) to be featured on Gallery's Messenger page as well.
• The Gallery team will review the entries and announce the winners by December 14, 2007 via this blog entry
• Winning items will be featured until December 31, 2007

Not sure how to get started?  Check out the developer center for tips on submitting Messenger items.  Just make sure to have a Holiday theme - Christmas, Hanukah, or any other Holiday you like to celebrate.  If you still have questions, you can add a comment to this blog to have your questions/comments answered.

The Windows Live Gallery team is happy to announce that we have just completed our most recent update to the community.

First, we are excited to finally talk about Windows Live Gallery enabling our partners to sell content via Microsoft Points.  We are joining other Microsoft businesses such as Xbox and Zune in using this exciting micro-transaction platform for premium content.  There are no partners that will be using it right away, but they are coming soon. 

Second, there are now Windows Live Gallery forums so that users, publishers and Microsoft can communicate better about requests and issues.  We heard that people didn’t see that their feedback was being acted upon or even heard.  Now you can use our forums to talk about Windows Live Gallery issues and gadget ideas.  This is also extended to publishers when they have submission issues.

Based on user feedback, we’ve made some improvements in the rating system for gadgets. This includes resetting the ratings for a large number of items.  If you’ve got favorites (or some that you especially dislike), please go back and re-rate them. We’re hoping our new system will make it easier for people to find the gadgets they want.

Along with these changes we have also made it easier for you to browse, search and download content.

There are a lot of other cool features and functionality that have been added, but have not been  "switched on" yet.  Don’t worry though, we will be posting more information as they are enabled.

Stay tuned!

Last, a special thanks goes out to everyone who provided us with crucial feedback over the last few months.  We have been listening to it and finally get to show you what we've been working on.

Please use our new Windows Live Gallery forums to continue to pass feedback to us.

We’ve received some questions about how to install a sidebar gadget from Gallery onto the Windows Vista Sidebar and also about how to bring back gadgets that were accidentally deleted.

To install a sidebar gadget from Gallery, follow the prompts in the installation process after clicking the download button for the gadget you are interested in:

1. If you are prompted with any install dialog, make sure you trust the developer before you continue by clicking install.
2. Choose Open on the file download message. (If you clicked Save, you may need to double-click the file to continue.)

That’s it! Your gadget should appear in the Sidebar after it’s been installed. If you uninstall the gadget, but later change your mind, you can return to Gallery to download it again.

If you accidentally deleted some of the original gadgets that came with your Windows Vista Sidebar, it’s easy to bring them back.

1. Right click the Sidebar and click on Properties.
2. Click the button that says Restore gadgets installed with Windows.

Katarina Ling – Program Manager

If you already have a gadget submitted to Gallery that is enabled only for Live.com, all you have to do is resubmit an updated version by clicking the Edit button on your author page. Check out some tips for making gadgets work on Spaces.

Alternatively, if you’d like to add a placeholder for the Spaces functionality, ToddOS has posted some sample code on how to simply display in Spaces that your gadget currently works only on Live.com: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1425770&SiteID=1

It’s also a good idea to include something similar to this alternative display if your gadget displays some truly personal information that you think your users would not want to be publicly shared out on Spaces.

Finally, you can review how to submit a gadget for Gallery at http://gallery.live.com/devcenter.aspx#Dev_3.

The Windows Live Gallery Team

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

We launched Windows Live Gallery's latest release today. In this release we have made a number of improvements to the site. Here is a quick run down of these updates:

• User interface improvements

o Based on your feedback, the submit page for item types has been updated to be cleaner and easier to follow. You can see the Web gadgets submit page here (you need to sign in first)

o We have divided My Profile page into two separate but logical parts.

1. First is the Your Gallery (you need to sign in first) page which lets you view/update your contributions to Gallery. The “Your Gallery” link is located in the left hand navigation of the main page
2. Second is the Options (you need to sign in first) page, which lets you update Gallery specific settings. The “Options”  link is located in the upper right hand corner of every page

o Gallery specific Help link is now located next to the Options link in the upper right hand corner of every page

o Our search box allows you the choice of "Search Gallery" or "Web"

o Gallery’s main page has a rotating section with information about the different items showcased on Gallery.

• Search macro improvements – We got a lot of user input that the Title of a shared macro was not very user friendly. Now when you create a search macro and share with Gallery, we fill the Title in the submit page with the friendly name you specified for the macro. Also you can try out the macro before adding it to your live.com page.
• Feedback form updates – The feedback form for Gallery now has a "Type of feedback" drop down. This helps us better categorize feedback. Once you are done with the feedback page, it will return you to the Gallery.
• System Requirements - On each item’s detail page you will see a "system requirements" section. This section helps you see what additional requirements are required to run an item properly.
• Reasons for Item not accepted - By popular demand, Gallery is now showing the automated rejection reasoning for a contributor’s item submission. Contributors will see this information in the rejection email they receive for an item submitted.

We really hope you like the work we have done for this release. Let us know what you think by sending us feedback.

The Windows Live Gallery Team

This Thanksgiving, we are featuring five gadgets that you can add to your Windows Live Spaces or Live.com page. They include:

• Directions
• Weather
• Today Show’s Recipe Search
• Calorie Calculator
• and to round out the fun, Cocktail Mix Flash Gadget

You can check them out on the main gadgets page. We plan to have relevant items showcase for similar occasions so get your creative juices flowing and create items that may be useful for the coming holidays!

Happy Thanksgiving from the Windows Live Gallery team!

Katarina Ling – Program Manager

Tags are keywords that you can add to an item on Gallery to help others find similar stuff when they search or browse. Here’s an example of how tagging works. Let’s say you are browsing the site and come across the Blockade Sidebar Gadget. After reading a little bit about this item, you think it reminds you of a game you like to play called "Tetris", so you add a tag "Tetris". Tagging Blockade as "Tetris" makes Blockade easier to find when someone else is looking for a game like Tetris, because now Blockade will be grouped with any other gadget that shares the "Tetris" tag.

So here are a few tips and best practices on tagging:

• Whenever you add a tag, please use a meaningful word that will help others find the item. Please do not add tags that are email addresses, url's or other irrelevant pieces of information, since these are not helpful to the rest of the Gallery community.

• You can add as many tags as you want. 

• If you find a tag that seems inappropriate, use the Report Abuse link to report it for review. Tags can be removed by our team if they violate the Terms of Use and Code of Conduct.

You might have noticed that the tags on each item's page are also links. If you click on it, you'll find other items with the same tag. If you want to see all the tags in a particular section of Gallery, you can do so when you browse (As an example, try browsing the Toolbar buttons section) Click the "Popular tags" link on the left side of the page to see the list. Then click a tag to find all the items in this section with this tag. We hope that you'll find this to be an easy way to discover new or related items on Gallery. :)

Junaid Basir - Program Manager

In the past few months, we have made improvements to Windows Live Gallery based on feedback we have received from you. Your feedback has helped us improve our abuse reporting to include reviews and tags, better the navigation so you can find the information you are looking for and add several other features. But – we need more feedback – we want to know how we’re doing and what you think we should be doing to improve. It’s easy to send feedback. Go directly to the Gallery Feedback page or follow the steps below:

1. Go to the Gallery site
2. Click the "Send feedback" link in the left hand navigation column to get to our feedback page.
3. “Type of feedback” drop down option lets you specify the gallery area you want to give feedback for. This field is optional.
4. Write your feedback in the text area.
5. We have added a new drop down which lets you specify your likelihood to recommend gallery to others. This field is optional.
6. Click Submit and you are done – it’s that easy :)

That’s it! We go through feedback and feature requests regularly as we plan our future direction.

Junaid Basir - Program Manager

We are really excited by the response of the community towards Windows Live Gallery. Not only are people actively engaged in posting reviews and tagging items, but a lot of you have also been busy submitting items for inclusion on the site. Since our launch, Gallery has posted over 1300 items contributed by the community. Most of our top downloads in each of the sections on Gallery are those created by the community. We are thrilled to see this kind of engagement and are developing a process to highlight community contributions.

To get the ball rolling, we have handpicked a few Web and Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets that caught our attention and put them in our Featured items module. They are:

1. Live Clock
2. GMT Clock
3. Hot or Not
4. Outlook Info
5. Media Player Shuffle Gadget

Take a look and see what you think of these items. If you find an item on the site you think should be featured, send us feedback. We would like to highlight popular, unusual, and interesting items from the community in other categories as well.  In addition, we are thinking about doing a contest for item creators on the site with winners getting featured status; do you like the idea?

As a member of the Gallery community, you and others like you have been indispensable in improving the site and making its content richer. Thanks and keep those submissions coming!

Junaid Basir - Program Manager

Please use the review section of the item detail page to help others make an educated decision about using an item. Here are some examples of what we’re looking for:

Helpful:
This is a pretty useful weather gadget. It has a clean, clutter free user interface. It displays the weather for today and the next three days. I liked the image representations which helps scan the weather data quickly. One issue I have with this gadget though is that there is no intuitive way to change your location.

Not helpful:
This gadget doesn’t work on Windows XP!

Writing helpful reviews is one way you can contribute to the Gallery community. Meanwhile, we are also actively working to make it easier for developers and users to communicate about item issues. Please stay tuned as things unfold!

Junaid Basir - Program Manager

There are over 850 items on the Windows Live Gallery! Kudos to all of you who have contributed items. Below are some helpful tips on getting your item through the acceptance process:

• Everything on Windows Live Gallery needs to comply with our Terms of Use. It is a good idea to check it out it before you submit.
• Web gadgets must contain only relative references to files that are packaged in the same zip file.
• A neatly packaged .zip file of all of the Web Gadget files is a must
• All items must install and de-install properly.

We hope these tips make the acceptance process go smoothly and as always, send us feedback. Please keep uploading new, cool, interesting items; this really helps Gallery deliver a great experience for all our users.

Kevin Liang – Program Manager

Today, we launched Windows Live Gallery in beta in 21 markets and 15 languages. In addition we've also added support for Windows Live Writer plug-ins and Windows SideShow (available on certain Vista capable laptops). Plus, there are a few things we've updated to improve the overall Gallery experience based on your feedback!

With this release Gallery is available in 21 markets and 15 languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese. Here's more info on the new types of content available on the site:

• Writer Plug-ins
  Windows Live Writer is a desktop app that makes it easier to create cool, rich blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or another blog service. Seamlessly insert rich content like pictures and maps and enjoy rich WYSIWYG editing in the style of your blog to see exactly what your posts will look like before you publish. With the Writer SDK, you can create extensions and plugins to insert  cool content. Try out these Writer extensions and plug-ins: Firefox 'Blog This' Extension, IE 'Blog This' Extension and Event Plugin available on Gallery.
• SideShow Gadgets
  Windows SideShow is a platform in Windows Vista that enables you to run gadgets that receive data to secondary displays like cell phones, laptop lid displays etc. If you are interested in creating your own Windows SideShow gadgets take a look at the SideShow SDK or an overview of SideShow.

Have a Windows SideShow compatible PC? Check out the new Picture Viewer (beta) available on Gallery.

Hope you enjoy your experience with the Windows Live Gallery as we continue to make improvements. Please keep the feedback coming! 

Junaid Basir - Program Manager

As you've probably noticed, a bunch of the Gallery's Gadgets have two buttons on them “Add to Live.com” or “Add to Spaces.” We added this functionality a few weeks ago in sync with the latest release of Windows Live Spaces to enable you to easily choose web gadgets from Gallery to customize your space. Since then, there are a few cool web gadget examples we’ve noticed on the Gallery site from our community – here are a few:

1. iTunes Songs – created by LiveGadgets – has already had over 30,000 downloads!
2. Hangman – created by ToddOS1
3. Simple Calendar for Spaces – created by JeffreyZhao_Fool
4. Cool Pictures from Windows Live Spaces – created by DarefromMicrosoft

The Spacecraft, the Spaces team blog, has a great overview on creating cool web gadgets to run on both Spaces & Live.com, here’s a snippet:

“Remember that the Live.com portal is about YOU catching up on the world.   Spaces is about the world (however big or small you define it with the permissions you set) catching up on YOU.  Users will decide which gadgets are worthy of adding to their space or not, and given our experience with Spaces features to date, the ones that will be the most successful will be:

Customizable -- let the space author personalize the gadget so their instance of it is different than another Spaces user's instance.  This could be as simple as letting the space author select the city they want to show weather for OR as complicated as pulling the user's account data in from another service (ie, his/her Netflix queue). 

Reflective of the author's personality -- a gadget that helps the author to be creative with little or no work is more relevant than one that lets a visitor come to a space and check their mail account or convert their currency.  All of those gadgets are killer apps; it's just the ones that are more like sharing your photos or music tastes will probably be more popular. 

Adaptive to our rich themes/layouts -- after adding your gadget to your own space for testing, try selecting a bunch of dark and light themes AND moving the gadget between our narrowest and widest columns to make sure it works well in all scenarios.  You want that puppy to shine!”

Wanna create your own? Here’s how to get started: 

1. Build a Windows Live web gadget according to the SDK available at the Windows Live Dev site. Don't forget to take a look at the Spacecraft post for the 411 on optimizing your gadget for Spaces (author mode for personalized settings).
2. Zip up your manifest file and supporting Javascript/CSS files and submit that gadget package to the Windows Live Gallery so other Spaces visitors can add it to their space by going to Customize --> Modules --> "Add gadgets from Windows Live Gallery".  Once it has been verified to work in each service (we will do this step as part of the check in process), it will appear in the Gallery for users to add to Live.com or Spaces.  Make sure you use relative URLs (mygadget.css instead of http://foogadgetdeveloper.com/mygadget.css) in your manifest XML to point to the scripts/CSS or the gadget will be rejected during verification.    
3. If you tricked out your space with Gadgets or come across a cool space with Gadgets drop us a line by commenting on this post, or you can send mail to spgadget@microsoft.com. Same thing applies if you have feedback or feature requests for making gadget development for Spaces better.

We'll be updating the Gadgets SDK and sample code on http://dev.live.com soon to reflect the additional Spaces info. For more info on the new features available on Windows Live Spaces, check out the video with Mike Torres, the Lead Program Manager on Windows Live Spaces, or visit http://discoverspaces.live.com for a tour.

Heather – Lead Product Planner