Happy Black Friday everyone.  If you’re like me, then you’ll be doing a lot of your holiday shopping online this year.  My favorite way to look for deals is actually to go walk around Best Buy or REI with a coffee, pick out what I want, and then go and find it for cheaper on the internet.  Hopefully soon I’ll be able to scan barcodes with my Android phone, see prices instantly and do a one-click order to have whatever it is sent to my house.

In the meantime though I use Ebay quite a lot, even as it continues to loose ground against Amazon (which I also use a lot). This Ebay gadget is labled as the “official” one, and lets you link your Ebay account to the gadget in a very official way (see screenshots). Once you’ve got it linked, you can use its very mediocre version of search (I don’t recommend it), or more importantly, you can use the gadget to monitor all your watched, bidded and won items from inside iGoogle. This is akin to using the Gmail gadget to preview your inbox. Instead of keeping Ebay open all day, you can use iGoogle instead, and hopefully check a few other things (like your stocks) all at the same time. This gadget could definitely stand to be improved.  First, it’s slow to load for no apparent reason.  Second, since the gadget is really about monitoring things you’ve done on Ebay.com, it would be great if it included richer monitoring options inline, like the ability to turn on SMS or email alerts.  Lastly, this gadget would be a good candidate for a canvas view that improves its horrible search function.  Also, what is the deal with the horizontal scroll bar in dashboard view?  The UI designer must have been asleep on that one.  Despite lots of searching, I wasn’t able to track down an official Amazon gadget, so Ebay has a leg up there. Happy bidding!

If you’re like me and you’re planning to mail out some gifts this holiday season, then you might be interested in this gadget. It shows side-by-side rate comparisons and delivery times for 20 different shipping classes from USPS, Fedex, DHL and UPS. For example if I were to ship myself across the country in a large cardboard box with a delivery time of 2 days, it would cost me $721 for UPS second day air, but only $530 for Fedex 2nd day. That’s 27% savings!!

The main issue with this gadget is its ridiculous and inexcusable use of screen real estate. A quick check shows it is occupying 417 X 700 pixels of my page in dashboard view. That’s a full 24 square inches. 24 inches Shipgooder, really? Strip out the logo and the tips, put the form fields side by side, and I bet you can get this down to a height of 100 pixels or less. While it’s interesting and somewhat unfortunate that DHL just cut 9500 jobs in the US, I’m not sure I need to see that on my homepage. Oh and that lone five-star comment you gave yourself in the directory is not fooling anyone. A quick look at Shipgooder’s site shows they’ve got quite a lot of work to do on the usability front in general, but they’ve got a great concept going here.

I looked high and low for a great Thanksgiving gadget to celebrate the holiday today, and what did I find? A photo gadget with pictures of winter, a “thanksgiving songs” gadget that was a big ad for Amazon, and a collection of flash games involving turkeys that were shrunk down beyond recognition. For shame! What about a recipe contest, or a photo gadget where you can post pictures of your hard work, or top ten myths about thanksgiving day origins, or something a little bit innovative!

Anyway, after messing around with turkey bowling and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade gadget (horrendously slow and clunky), I decided to go with a simple Recipe feed from Elise.com to get back to what the holiday is really about, eating enormous amounts of food. The feed includes a new recipe every couples of days, with a picture and a long description, and tries for quality over quantity. Elise boasts that every recipe is tested by her or her family personally, and she has even posted this heartwarming picture of her parents to prove it! Recipes for today include Turkey Soup, Stuffing, apple pie and quite a few more.  Cons, the feed could use some sharing functionality and/or inline ratings to make it a bit more interactive, but otherwise very solid.

This compound gadget allows you to gather multiple gadgets into a single gadget with tabs, saving space and cutting down on load time. Instead of loading 13 gadgets simultaneously, I can now load them as I use them. While you do lose a small amount of width, that’s a small price to pay for what I consider to be its best feature: Compound Canvas Views.

The Canvas is still relatively new, but Google is encouraging igoogle developers to save their gadget meat for this view. The additional space and functionality I like. What I don’t like is all the popping back and forth between Canvas and Home views. The “left nav intrusion” was justified by its giving us one-click access to canvas views from any view or tab. But it’s choppy and awkward. This gadget’s compound canvas view makes this sort of navigation easy and smooth. It’s also reminiscent of the old horizontal tab days.

This gadget will definitely make you rethink your iGoogle layout. You might even find yourself using multiple compound gadgets. Definitely a gadget gem…straight from Google.

This gadget is a fully-functional version of Popcap’s Bejeweled game (probably a renegade gadget since Popcap is not the developer). Since 2001, Bejeweled has been downloaded 150 million times, making it one of the most popular games on the internet. The objective of this game is to swap one gem with an adjacent gem to form a horizontal or vertical chain of three or more gems. Bonus points are given when more than three identical gems are formed or forms two lines of identical gems in one swap. Gems disappear when chains are formed and gems fall from the top to fill in gaps. If you love Scrabulous, you’ll probably like this game.

In terms of it’s iGoogle implementation, the game is unfortunately shrunk down a bit from it’s standalone version and no canvas mode has been created. It will also slow down your page quite a bit, so you might want to keep it minimized when you’re not using it. In general I can’t give much in the way of props to the developer, since he didn’t do too much here, but to his credit the game is not plastered with ads, which is a big plus.

This gadget is a shining example of iGoogle at its best, a highly functional, quick-loading mini-app with an strong standalone site backing it up.  It’s got several features that appeal to organizational freaks like myself, who enjoy making lists just to cross things off.

The app is project-based, so you mgith start by creating a list for “Blog Updates,” and then creating some tasks and subtasks that fall under that project like “Review Todoist.”  Once you have your projects and tasks set up you can order them, prioritize them and search across them using a special query language.  For example, you might ask to see all tasks with a deadline this week, or all tasks that are currently priority 1.  You can also set up the default view to display just one project or all your projects when you open up iGoogle.  Another nice feature is that the gadget retains your history so you can go back and look at old tasks.

On the whole the UI on the gadget is fairly strong and very reminisent of Google itself, allthough I think the number of clicks required for some tasks (such as switching between products) could probably be reduced with some better top-level navigation.  Bottom line, great todo list with a lightweight UI by a developer who obviously reads comments and listens to his user base.  Potential improvements include using something like Federated Login to streamline the initial login and adding a canvas mode.  Interesting then that the last gadget (Amazing Places), which was weak on functionality but good for eyecandy has almost 200 times as many users!  I wonder what that says about the way people are using iGoogle?

Judging by the number of users on this gadget (764,697) they must be doing something right.  This gadget is a classic photo feed that gives you new travel photos with each page refresh.  The photos are pretty nice, but there are two pieces missing here 1) none of these photos are available in high-res, probably because the authors just grabbed them off image search somewhere and 2) the gadget has none of the features we’ve come to expect with online photos like sharing, commenting, tagging etc.  Clicking on an image takes you through to “etravelreviews.com,” which looks like it could use some work itself.  The inclusion of a Google custom search for travel looks like it’s geared toward monetization rather than adding functionality, but might be useful for some users.  Bottom line, good for eyecandy but not much else.

Last week iGoogle introduced several new features including a left-hand nav bar and expandable gadgets.  This change was explained in a post on the Google.com blog.

“Having everything in one place is super convenient, but I often wish I could deal with all my stuff without having to leave my iGoogle page.”

Part of this change involved releasing a new Gmail gadget, that makes use of “canvas” (expanded) view to allow users to send, forward, archive and delete emails from inside iGoogle.  When the gadget is at its normal size, it provides a simple preview of the inbox.  While it’s great to see new features added to the gadget, on the whole, working with the partially functioning version of Gmail available in expanded view is not much fun.  It doesn’t allow you to save drafts, send attachments, search, use labels etc, which has some users very pissed.  My inclination is to skip the expanded view and go straight to full Gmail when I need to do something, which makes me wonder why the gadget doesn’t just do that automatically (maybe this could be added as an option in the user preferences). Bottom line is dashboard mode is still as useful as ever, but the expanded view probably introduces more problems than it solves, particuiarly since it’s not much faster than just opening Gmail.

If you like crosswords as much as me, you’re going to like this guy. The interface for making edits beats paper handily because it takes the work out of scanning for the right number. My biggest issue is actually that the “reveal” feature is tough to keep from clicking. Full functionality is contained in canvas view and the dashboard view is nice and compact the way it should be. Good work NYT.