aBowman

Here are the new features I added to the Spider Gadget:

• The spider now has an abdomen/belly.
• Its legs are now jointed.
• You can set the color of the spider’s legs, belly, and the background.
• You can set a background jpg image.
• You can change its size and speed.
• You can rename it.

Update: I added an “Original Look” checkbox in the settings for those of you who prefer the original spider.

I finally got the first version of the Fish Gadget completed! Right now the fish can follow your mouse or swim around if the mouse is not active. They can also eat the food you give them by clicking the mouse. Over the next few weeks I will be adding new features, so if you have any requests, please leave a comment. I will also be making it compatible with other pages too like Pageflakes, Netvibes, etc.

I just added an update to the Tree Frog Gadget that allows you to display a jpg image behind the frog. Just edit your preferences and add the address of the jpg image to the Background Image textbox.

I added a few new features to the Color Chooser gadget.

• You can now save 8 colors by clicking on the color preview box.
• Clicking on the saved colors, reloads the RGB and hex values of the colors.
• You can now rename the gadget. This would be useful if you added the gadget to your page more than once and wanted to label them to tell them apart when they are minimized.

I decided to create this Color Chooser gadget a couple days ago after updating the Tree Frog Google gadget. That update allows users to enter custom hex colors to color the parts of the tree frog. With the Color Chooser gadget, you can find just the color you are looking for by adjusting the red, green, and blue values with the slider controls or by entering numbers from 0-255 in the text boxes. When you see a color you like, copy the hex value from the HTML Notation text box and paste it into the Custom Color text boxes of the Tree Frog gadget or wherever else you may want to use it.

It looks like most of my Google Gadgets are temporarily unavailable due to my exceeding the bandwidth allowed by Google Pages. I wish that there was a bandwidth meter available so that I could have seen this coming. I’m going to have to find another place to host my gadgets.

Update: If any of the google gadgets are not working for you, you should be able to get them working again by adding them to your page from this site. This will retrieve the gadget from the new location.

I made some bug fixes to the Tree Frog Google Gadget that should improve the load time. I also added a minor update that allows users to add four colors of their choosing. To do this, the user adds hex colors to the new Custom Color text boxes and then selects the custom color from the drop downs. This will make it easier for people to match the tree frog to the color of their site when using this page.

Stay tuned for a color chooser gadget that I should be done with late tonight or early tomorrow.

In Windows, you can embed resizable web pages to your desktop background by following this procedure:

1. Right-click on your desktop and select Properties.
2. Click on the Desktop tab.
3. Press the Customize Desktop button.
4. Click the Web tab.
5. Press the New button.
6. Enter a web page address to the location textbox.