By: Michael Boucher

Just finished up the G4tv.com X-Play Video Widget which was a lot of fun to work on and allowed me to trim all of the fat off of my earlier video component classes. Now I've got a nice lean set of video components that are highly customizable both via Flash GUI or by extending the classes.

Some of the other cool things going on here have to do with the Clearspring API which facilitates the ability to share the widget across blogs, social networks and start pages. The API provides data on the widget such as the number of children the widget has total and the number of children for a particular placement, such as the one here in this post. We used the placement data to affect the number of floating X's in the background of the widget, setting a minimum and maximum to ensure the background didn't get out of control. This acts as a nice visual representation of how well a particular placement is doing.

Another data point we are able to retrieve is whether the current user viewing a particular placement of the widget is the owner of that placement, meaning they placed it there. We use this check to control display of the sharing button. For those "guests" they are presented with an "Add to Profile" button which allows them to place the widget on their profile page such as a MySpace or Facebook account, bookmark the widget or place it on a start page like iGoogle or Netvibes.  If the viewer is the "owner" of the widget, we present the user with the next logical step after "placing" the widget, which is sharing it with their friends, so the "owner" is presented with a "Send to Friend" button.

More widgets to come ...