I knew my wife loved me when she got me a Chumby for Christmas, without really knowing what it was.  What is a Chumby you ask?  It’s hard to define, but you might call it a wifi-internet-clock-radio, with a touch screen, accelerometer, and other inputs for running and interacting with Flash-based widgets.  But in the right hands, it’s so much more.  It’s an open source linux-based playground.  Even the hardware can be tinkered with (although I’m not about to crack open the case on my new $120 toy).

I’ve only tried a tiny fraction of the over 1300 free widgets that you can add to your Chumby.  Some widgets are for entertainment, such as Chumbyland which lets you take part in a virtual world shared by other Chumbyland users.  There are also widgets for news or RSS feeds, such as the Engadget widget that keeps you up-to-date on the latest gadget reviews at Engadget.com.  I use a widget to subscribe to this blog.   There are weather widgets, widgets for email or Twitter, and more widgets for photos or web cams.  And of course, clock widgets.  It’s an alarm clock after all.

But possibly one of the best features of Chumbys is that you can write your own widgets and place them on your Chumby, or share them with the Chumby community.  My first widget was an analog clock with a rectangular face.  I then added sound files to it so it would speak to me the time when I tapped the touch screen.  And finally, I added the optional feature of having the widget announce the time automatically at certain intervals, such as every 30 minutes, or whenever the widget came on the screen.  The widget is nothing to marvel at, but I am impressed with how well received it is in the Chumby community, and how supportive they were when I stumbled with my first widget.

I’m now working on getting some Chumbys in the office so we can do some real widget development! We’ve got an array of widget ideas just waiting to be developed, but I can’t let the cat out of the bag yet. Got a widget idea that you’d like to see become a reality? Let us know in the comments.

This entry was posted by Kris on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Code Logic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Chumby, Flash, Linux, widget