In the tradition of giving our users choices, I was going to add Property Center gadgets for Microsoft Live.  

As always, MS takes the course of the c/c++ developer.  Their gadget api is needlessly complex, imo.  Whereas Google allows a nice mix of html and javascript, Microsoft gadgets are pure javascript.  Not only that, they require that you implement methods such as Dispose and initialize… those should be abstracted away and automatically handled by the widget framework, imo.  Basically they require knowledge of the atlas framework when writing gadgets…

Next… settings/preferences… Google provides a nice easy way of allowing users
to change settings.  The end user experience is consistent across all gadgets and dead simple to implement as a developer.  This is sort of the time that I decided to scrap Property Center Live.com gadgets for the time being.

Another thing that bugs me is that there is no way to view the source of existing gadgets.  I personally think that’s a major mistake, since the majority of people create their gadgets by using someone else’s as a starting point.  Perhaps they do this, though, so that people don’t see how complex creating a gadget for live.com is.

Honestly, how do they expect mass gadget/widget production like Google
and Yahoo have seen, when creating a gadget is such a pain in the ass?

So for right now. I’m going to hold off on Live.com widgets.  When they update their framework to support basic widget requirements, I’ll take another look.  See you in a year or two live.com.