Show HN: Widget.json and Widget Construction Set

[bmalicoat]

My friend and I just finished this project last week. I'd love to hear your feedback.

widget.json brings a dynamic window to the web to your device's home screen. It's kind of like RSS for widgets, you make a widget.json for whatever web data you want and then subscribe to it in Widget Construction Set, our iOS widget.json viewer.

We've made image of the day and word of the day widgets, Youtube channel widgets that show the latest videos, RSS widgets, Prometheus counter widgets and more. You can imagine a GitHub CI widget showing the last build status with a link to view it. Friend groups could make a shared scratch pad of text and images. Househoulds can make a shared TODO or grocery list widget. Widgets can use local device launch schemes which enables widgets to initiate text messages, calls, emails, shortcuts apps, and more. With this, you can make a widget that shows images of your favorite people and when you tap their image it FaceTimes them. If you're worried about Twitter, you could even make your own one-way Twitter replacement where your text and images show up on your followers home screen!

Ideally, sites add a widget.json feed alongside their RSS feed. widget.json files have a one-click subscribe link to easily add them to Widget Construction Set. This gives sites and creators a simple, direct connection to their users without the need of building a separate app or having their users remember to visit their site. For Patreon or other user-supported creators, they can offer private widgets that are only granted to their supporters.

We couldn't figure a way to make a business on this, but we liked what the technology enabled so we're releasing it all for free, with the exception of a one-time $2.99 purchase to view private widgets. Though since the widget.json format is open, if $2.99 is too steep, people are free to make their own private widget viewer as well.

Widget Construction Set: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/widget-construction-set/id6444...

[phillipseamore]

Nice! I'll play with this over the weekend.

Have you thought about adding refresh rate to the schema? I've got some ideas were I'd simply like it to refresh once per day at 6am (like: "update_at": "2022-11-29T06:00:00Z") and another one that I'd like to update at a 10 min interval ("update_interval": 600).

[bmalicoat]

Great call! We did talk about this a little bit, but it didn't make the v1 schema. Definitely seems like a smart idea to support given that some widget.jsons might require a fair bit of work to assemble (and you don't want to build caching on the server) or maybe some are just more static than others.

[Zee2]

This idea is super similar to Microsoft's adaptive cards concept. Declarative JSON format for compact application views delivered from Web APIs.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/adaptive-cards/

[bmalicoat]

Thanks for sharing this! I hadn't heard of it before.

[dmje]

I like it, really cool idea - but you badly need a catalogue of some kind. Even just a set of links to example widgets on your website that the first time user can copy and paste would do it - better would be something searchable in the app. Cool tho, will have a play. Good work

[bmalicoat]

Thanks! I agree about the catalog. I expanded on the thought here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33780128 tl;dr - couldn't make economics work but we felt the tech is still useful for DIYers.

[Gys]

I installed the app. Reading the text above I expected to see a list of predefined jsons/urls from which I could choose. To get instant gratification ;-) But instead I need an url (no idea, just opening this for the first time) plus link to your website with a long text describing the format.

Would be better if you at least provide a list with example urls.

Idea: add a simple editor to directly edit jsons (tweak them) on my phone.

[bmalicoat]

You're totally right. We originally built a backend service with a catalog to curate widget.json as part of a paid service. We couldn't work out the economics (and it felt a little weird charging when we didn't make the content itself), so we released it as a more open, DIY-friendly thing. On https://wd.gt, we've got a few examples of static widgets, but they wouldn't be very useful to subscribe to. I'd like to build a few that are worthwhile (e.g. NASA image of the day).

Great idea on the editor too. We were pursuing a web-based widget.json editor that had a live preview and didn't require you to necessarily type in json, instead it would have a little wizard or even drag and drop elements to lay them out.

[bmalicoat]

I happened to read this comment this morning which is exactly the type of use case we had in mind when developing widget.json: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33776994

[lyptt]

This looks awesome, unfortunately my attempts to use it result in showing some kind of placeholder blue image with a yellow and black corner, despite it appearing correctly in the list of available widgets. Hopefully that gets fixed soon.

[bmalicoat]

Hmm... that shouldn't happen! If you want to jump over to the discord, I can help debug - https://discord.gg/GnmdtvKW7M No sweat if not.

[ilaksh]

To my device or to my Apple-only device? I have Android.

[bmalicoat]

We've only made the iOS widget viewer since that's what we both have, but from what I know about Android widgets, it seems possible to build one there too. The widget.json schema is intended to be platform-agnostic.