We’ve been testing out a new version of the Mini Explorer gadget for a little while now and decided it was a good time to unleash its refined power on the populace at large. What’s new with the gadget you ask? Almost everything.

We re-wrote the majority of the gadget code (don’t worry, the design is still the same) to allow us to add in more engines quickly and easily. Beyond that though, we’ve managed to do some interesting technical stuff like (you can skip this part if you’re not interested) reduce memory footprint, increase speed, and allow for file specific engine links with all sorts of override tags for flexibility.

We have Blogs, Sports, and Dailymotion now! Lots of spiffy links and RSS reader pages set up for the blogs to make life even easier when trying to catch up on what’s going on in the world.

We also read the e-mails and comments from across the pond. There are a bunch of new countries added to this edition including Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, India, Japan, and Brazil. We’ve tried to customize where we can, though it mostly applies to search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Another nifty feature in this update is the engine enable / disable menu in the settings panel. While re-ordering engines is a little complicated at this point, you can disable the ones you aren’t planning on using to whittle the menu down to a much friendlier size. It only works on main engines, but its something we hope to expand on over time.

Several sock gnomes may have been injured during the testing of this gadget. Don’t worry, nobody was killed.

We also upgraded the flyout with new resize options, faster loading, and included a basic search history (which can be disabled in the settings panel). We know the limitations of the flyout iFrame are many, but we’re hoping that some extra work in the enhanced pages will make up for some of that. We’re still keeping an eye out for decent alternatives that would allow true browsing in the iFrame, sadly, the code support just isn’t there quite yet.

There is a new icon color and we made some small touch ups to the shape. We realize that it’s a significant jump in color but hopefully it’s not too off-putting. It’s an experiment, if it doesn’t work we’ll go back to black, if people don’t mind it, we’ll keep it where it is. Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments.

As always, comments, feedback, praise, and questions are all very welcome. If you have any problems with the gadget let us know either here in the comments or send in an e-mail via the contact page and we’ll do our best to provide support for any issues that crop up. We did extensive testing on this gadget, but that doesn’t mean the odd problem can’t crop up, especially with such a radical redesign of the working parts.

Enjoy!

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
and is filed under Development, Gadget Stuff.



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