Desktop Gadget Sharing

AddThis now supports sharing Flash and HTML widgets to your Windows or Apple OS X desktop. We do the necessary conversion so users can install your content on their computer as a native desktop gadget.

AddThis Menu Support

AddThis menus now have two additional services: "OSX Dashboard" and "Windows" that will be enabled when the parameter ui_use_embeddable_services is activated in the AddThis Client API. The menu will detect the user's operating system and only show the relevant service.

OExchange Support

We also offer OExchange compatible sharing endpoints for the Windows and Apple OSX Dashboard services. You can call them like this:

We'll scan the shared page for embeddable content and pass it on to the user's desktop. Please refer to the sharing endpoints documentation for more details.

Specifying Content for Sharing

Embeddable content can be shared to desktop services in several ways:

The page can be tagged with meta tags (http://www.addthis.com/help/embedded-content#tagging)
A configuration can be shared from the AddThis menu (http://www.addthis.com/help/menu-api#configuration-sharing)
You can specify your own custom gadget using the “module” parameter from on the AddThis menu and OExchange APIs. The value of the “module” parameter is expected to be an external download link to the file.

Example :

		http://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/windows/offer? url=http://example.com&module=http://example.com/windows.gadget

Installation

Desktop sharing will download the content to your user’s computer. If your user is on a Mac, double-clicking the downloaded ZIP archive will extract a file with the.wdgt extension. Clicking on this file will install the widget to the computer’s dashboard. If you're on a PC, double-clicking the downloaded .gadget file will prompt a message. Click on "Install", and the gadget will automatically be placed on your Windows Sidebar.

Note: For OSX dashboard, if your gadget contains scrollbars, scrolling functionality will only work when clicking on the scroll areas or scroll arrows.

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