Widgets, in terms of concept, are getting quite popular. Not only because of the interest from Yahoo! when they bought Konfabulator more than a year ago, or their embedding in MacOS X and in the next Windows Vista, but now also Adobe with Apollo is “pushing” into that direction. A strength of a widget is that it can stay in the background providing subtle information, or something we should keep in mind, being this content visible every now and then (when we hide or close all the opened applications, for instance).

How does the happiness fit in? Recently, thanks to a couple of lectures I’ve seen on TEDTalks, I started thinking again about what makes us happy – who doesn’t? Basically happiness is a status that can happen in very different contexts and it’s not a result of an entire analysis of what happened so far, but it can be triggered, also if temporary, just by a positive thought. Doing a whole analysis about what happened to us we will always be able to find reasons to be happy and reasons not to be so. The first trick so it’s simply to think about the good things.

During a small research on the topic I found the reasons why people are happy very inspiring. Not only because sometimes you can think “hey, how can be this guy happy only because of that?”, and this can trigger a kind of self-consciousness that we should be happy also with smaller things. But what could be very helpful is to get some suggestions from there. For instance, if a person is happy because he helped a friend in troubles, if we are not happy, why don’t we try to help a friend? Happiness doesn’t always fall from the sky, sometimes you have to earn it.

So after these technological and social inputs I ended up developing a Yahoo! Widget (formerly Konfabulator), the Widget of Happiness.

As you can read I use the term “lucky” instead of “happy”, this is because the user maybe is not yet happy, but it should be after having remember the reasons. Probably the right terminology should be “I should be happy because…” but it gets too much explicit and pretentious in my opinion.

It has basically three simple functions:

There are some preferences you can set:

To avoid as much as possible any misunderstanding about its usage, I put some instructions that can be accessed using the right-click button menu.

Since a common aim for artists is to make people happy, if this simple widget will success on that, am I risking someone will start defining me like that?

I usually don’t like to talk about mere technology but something really remarkable due to one technology is happening. The tecnology I’m talking is ActionScript 3, the most recent version of ECMAScript-standard object-oriented programming language for Adobe Flash. Althogh it is still a beta technology, and we know how Macromedia used to keep safe this kind of things, people can already put hand on it thanks to the looking forward initiative of Adobe Labs.

Nothing so impressive maybe so far if we don’t consider the impact that the Flash fanaticism, said in a good way, can have when it is given to fancy developers a much lower level programming language. “Fancy” because Flash’s nature as drawing tool (remember Future Splash?) always made Flash developers deal with aesthetic. So, considering the freshness of this technology, it is impressing the hear which and how many projects are already on the way based on it. Here, for instance, the ones I heard recently:

- FC64 (C64 Emulator) by Claus Wahlers and Darron Schall: probably you could think “how the hell could it come in their minds?”, but it should have been a very nice challenge and for sure it will be a helpful project for old skool and nostalgic video gamers. Can you imagine a new trend of C64 games development?

- Brevity by Keith Peters: it’s delcared like the Flash version of Processing. Because the new heavy IDE that AS3 will have, based on Eclipse, and the compexity of the language, could be handy a meta-language to make the sketch development faster, and maybe to be as competitor of Processing as teaching tool. If it wasn’t for the probability that Flash Virtual Machine, because AS3 will need one, will be more diffuse than the Java one I would have some doubts about the utility of this tool. But since the expansion Flash had these last years I think this can become really popular.

- Visual Brain Storms by Branden Hall: I heard about it in the linked interview. As far as I understood it will be an application modular based (like Max/MSP) that will make the prototyping of projects intuitive and quick. I look forward to see it! Compare to Brevity, it seems this will use more a visual approach, so useful also to non-programmers.

I just hope it is not already too late to start thinking about other interesting applications based on AS3

Thanks to the myth Golan Levan, I have discovered www.processing.org, an amazing resource for Java Applet Coders. It is very useful at the begin.