HTML, CSS, and JavaScript® Mobile Development For Dummies®

Chapter 20

Top Ten Mobile Widgets

Web app? Widget? What's the difference? If you search for one or the other on Google, you'll get results for both. For the sake of this chapter, the distinction is negligible. A web app or widget here is simply a snippet of code you paste into your web page to create a desired object, such as a menu, a button, an array of buttons, some type of media viewer, such as a 3D rotation viewer, and so on. There are hundreds of web apps and widgets on the Internet, and they do all sorts of things. For simplicity's sake, from here on, let's just call them widgets.

The advantage of widgets is that they save you from re-creating the wheel. Many page elements you might want to use in your web sites have already been developed and placed on the Internet — all you have do is copy the code into the appropriate location on your web pages, and then make some minor adjustments to get the widget to look an behave the way you want it to.

This chapter finds and describes ten of the most popular and useful widgets available. You can then use these widgets in your future projects.

Google Maps JavaScript API

This widget allows you to add a Google Map, shown in Figure 20-1, to your website. The latest version, V3, is designed to work with standard computers and mobile devices. For instructions on installing it in your website, see Chapter 16. You can get the code for this widget at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/.

Figure 20-1: The Google ...