Some of you may know a widget as the small floating device that is found in a beer can, specifically Guinness! In Lotus Notes, a widget is a small application that you can install in the Lotus Notes sidebar. You can have several widgets installed. A widget can provide different types of information such as the weather in your area, stock prices on a day, and so on.
Widgets are great business tools as valuable information can be accessed quickly and can be customized to your preferences. You can also access some fun widgets such as comic strips, You Tube and even a virtual flower pot! Whether for fun or business, widgets are worth investigating. The topics we will explore in this chapter are:
- Widgets explained
- Adding widgets
- Live Text explained
- Setting up Live Text
To explain widgets further, let's look at some examples such as the LinkedIn widget from http://www.linkedin.com/lotus and Google Maps.
LinkedIn is a business, social networking site that we usually access and manage via e-mail and a web browser.
By using the LinkedIn widget, we can receive our LinkedIn e-mails and LinkedIn updates all in one place, which is the widget in the Lotus Notes sidebar. We will no longer need to have our inbox cluttered with LinkedIn e-mails and we don't need to log into the website either. Within this LinkedIn widget, we can search for people we want to contact and work with; we can also update and share our status. The following is an example widget panel in the Lotus Notes sidebar showing a LinkedIn profile:
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Another widget that is very useful is the Google Maps widget. When used in conjunction with Live Text, it enables us to right-click on an address in an e-mail or a document and then locate the address on Google Maps, all within Lotus Notes. The following is an example of an address that is being recognized as Live Text:
Live Text, in conjunction with widgets, allows Lotus Notes to recognize and highlight specific patterns of text such as an address, an individual's name, or a currency value within an e-mail, calendar entry or document in a Lotus Notes application; it will depend on what widgets we have installed. Once we see the underlined text as in the screenshot previous, we can right-click to display a menu that will give us options such as looking up an address using the Google Maps widgets, searching for details on an individual using the LinkedIn widget, or converting between currencies as there are several currency converter widgets available to install.
Widgets, as mentioned, can be utilized as a business tools that provide information. The type of information provided depends on the widgets we have installed. We have already mentioned some examples of widgets such as LinkedIn and Google Maps; however, there are countless variations of widgets available with a variety of purposes and uses. The following is a sample list:
- World clocks
- Local and world weather
- Gas comparison
- Stock prices
- NBA playoffs
- FedEx/US track
- Dictionary and thesaurus
- Wikipedia search
- Zip code search
- Currency converter
- Learning plugin for IBM Lotus Notes
Our organization may have created their own widgets that allow us to access and work within some of our organization's Lotus Notes applications.
To add (install) a widget to our sidebar in Lotus Notes, we can select them from various places such as:
- A Widget catalog provided by our organization
- Google gadget from http://www.linkedin.coters/gadgets/
- Notes Widgets website: http://www.noteswidgets.com/
- Public widgets catalog at http://greenhouse.lotus.com/plugins/plugincatalog.nsf
- Other websites that have widgets or gadgets available
- Someone mailing us a widget
Widgets that we add to Lotus Notes will typically have a file extension of .xml.
Once we have a widget added to our sidebar, we can customize how that widget displays, which we will cover later in the chapter.