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When we introduced the beta versions of Wolfram|Alpha Widgets and Widget Builder just a few short weeks ago, we asked, “So, what will you widget?” The answer we got was “A lot of creative, outside-the-box widgets!”
We fully expected to be blown away by all of the innovative and fun ways users would harness the power of Wolfram|Alpha on their blogs, websites, and on their social media networks. Wolfram|Alpha users have already customized and built over 1300 widgets with the easy-to-use drag-and-drop Widget Builder. You can browse them all in the Widget Gallery. If you haven’t created your first widget yet, take a quick tour or check out the demo video to see how simple it is to build your own free, custom Wolfram|Alpha-powered mini-app.
Not only have users been excited about customizing and building widgets, but they’ve been sharing them too! We’ve stumbled upon an impressive number of widgets on Twitter and Facebook. And widgets have been embedded in over 500 websites and blogs to date. We thought you’d enjoy seeing some of the handy widgets users are creating and sharing on a variety of websites and blogging platforms.
@ThinktankPlanet tweeted us a link to their custom astronomy widget on the Thinktank Birmingham science museum’s website. If you want to find the location of an astronomical object in the sky for a given city, time, and date, give this widget a try. You may also want to see how this custom widget appears on the website.
@footnote shared with us how they embedded a widget directly into a recent post about the historical value of money on Footnote’s official blog. This widget calculates the value of historical money in today’s terms.
You can add value to your site by embedding a custom widget that answers your readers’ frequently asked queries. For example, here’s a widget @desktopecon sent us that quickly calculates the unemployment rate for a given county. They added it to their blog for economic and workforce development professionals.
A school district in Ashland, Illinois, has provided students with helpful widgets that calculate statistics of standardized test scores, compare the cost of colleges, help students with their math, and show the current weather on its website.
A U.K.-based flooring company installed this handy tool on its website that helps customers estimate the number of flooring tiles needed to complete a project.
One of our incredible Wolfram|Alpha Community members has been busy populating the Widget Gallery with a collection of valuable widgets that calculate projectile motion, distance, relative weather, and more. Below is the line constructor widget from his website.
As students are preparing to hit the books again, educators are exploring new teaching tools for their classrooms. A few examples of how students and educators can use widgets this fall can be found on Ms. Bethea’s TEACHING|chemistry blog. She recently blogged about Wolfram|Alpha widgets and included a number of sample widgets for calculating density, comparing the properties of two substances, and comparing the properties of two elements, as seen below.
These are just several examples of how widgets are being used around the web. And from what we’ve seen so far, the possibilities are abundant. We’d like to thank everyone who’s been creating widgets and submitting feedback and ideas for the full version. We can’t wait to see what you’ll widget next!
Very motivating! I believe Widgets are very beneficial for scientific, educational and other communities. Widgets are informative, flexible, easy to build and easy to use. Thank you for your good work Wolfram|Alpha team and for mentioning my Widget “line constructor” in this post!