Hey everyone,

We've recently released some new features and updates to the documentation. Please take a moment and check out what's new:

+ New userpref data type: Lists + New feature: Analytics + Enhanced gadget scratchpad + Enable auto-resizing for syndicated gadgets + Correction: _IG_FetchContent() and type="url"

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++ New userpref data type: Lists

Chances are you've already seen the popular weather gadget (http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=http://www.google.com/ig/modul...) and noticed the way you can save a list of zip codes in the edit window. Using the new "list" data type, you can now do the same in your gadget!

This new data type allows you to capture an array of values dynamically supplied by the user at run-time. We've added two new methods under _IG_Prefs to support reading and writing to these userprefs. To read, call prefs.getArray() to retrieve your list as an array. To write values back to your list, use the prefs.setArray() method.

We've added a new section in our documentation describing how it's used. To learn more,
visithttp://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/fundamentals.html#list.

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++ New feature: Analytics

For everyone wishing to track gadgets using Google Analytics, we've finally released a simple method to do this. You must have a Google Analytics account before using feature. If don't have one, it's free, and you can sign up athttp://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html.

To use this feature, simply add <Require feature="analytics"/> in your gadget XML to import the analytics library. Then call _IG_Analytics() any time you wish to record a hit in your account. You can also use this method to track JavaScript events such as clicks, mouseovers, etc.

Here's a few links to help you get
started:http://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/tools.html#Analyticshttp://www.goo...

See how the developer gadget is using
it:http://www.google.com/ig/modules/developer.xml

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++ Enhanced gadget scratch pad

We've really enhanced the functionality of the gadget scratch pad to support many new features. Now you can load any external gadgets by URL into the scratch pad and preview them as syndicated gadgets on-the-fly. In addition, we provided a short static list of popular gadget links to quickly demonstrate it's use.
Visithttp://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/gs.html#Scratchpadtosee the new version.

The scratch pad is nothing more than a syndicated gadget, which means you can also add the scratchpad to your personalized homepage as well. Here's the new scratch pad gadget in the
directory:http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=scratchpad.xml

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++ Enable auto-resizing for syndicated gadgets

For publishers that are syndicating gadgets onto their websites, you can now set the gadget to automatically fit the width of the parent container. When generating the HTML snippet from the creator page (http://gmodules.com/ig/creator?synd=open&url=http://calebegg.com/coun...), there is a width parameter, "w=". Simply set this to "w=auto" to force the gadget's width to fill the containing space.

Here's an excerpt from the
documentation,http://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/publish.html#PageCreator: "Height (h) and width (w) parameters. The value of these parameters is typically the number of pixels. However, you can set the gadget width to fill the containing space by using w=auto. This is useful for flexible layouts where you don't know the number of pixels beforehand."

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++ Correction: _IG_FetchContent() and type="url"

If you're writing a type="url" gadget while importing our JavaScript libraries in your content script, please note that _IG_FetchContent(), _IG_FetchXmlContent(), and _IG_FetchFeedAsJSON() cannot be used in this case only. We've added this as an additional restriction to type="url" gadgets in our documentation. You can see the various notes at these locations:

-http://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/fundamentals.html#Content_Type (third row under table) -http://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/remote-content.html#Introduction (after first three bullets)

If your gadget requires fetching remote content from third-party sites, we highly recommend type="html" as the alternative.

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Happy coding!

Dann