Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

When I was developing my NCAA Basketball widget barely in time for March Madness last year, one of the more annoying issues was that, once a live version of my widget got out there, users that downloaded it would be stuck with whatever buggy or unpolished behavior came along with that version unless they were religiously checking and installing my updates from the Widget Gallery. Sure, I suppose the take-home lesson is to just write better widget code, but, heh, it can be trickier than it sounds, folks.

So one very fun feature that the Widgets team added (and that I entirely missed out on up until now) is the ability to automatically notify users of new updates just through resubmission to the gallery. All you need to do is register for a unique widget identifier and set version numbers correctly, and it seems like it'll just work, notifying users of your widget that a new version is available and prompting them to install it. I'll admit that I haven't personally tried this out just yet, because March and NCAA basketball are still a few more months away. But, if it works as advertised, you'll know once I do.

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