A page similar to this was part of the former Bluepulse widget enthusiast site. Any links that you had pointing to it should have automatically redirected here. This page is maintained for reference only.

What is Bluepulse?

Bluepulse (uppercase “B”) is the company behind the mobile platform bluepulse ( lowercase “b”). The bluepulse platform is a piece of software you install on your cell phone that enables you to use widgets, which are tiny applications that provide slices of functionality to you.

You can think of bluepulse (metaphorically) as being similar to a PC operating system, for example, Windows. Windows does some neat things on its own, but most of us spend our time working in applications that install under Windows. We use browsers to visit web sites, Outlook to access our e-mail, Word to compose documents. Windows manages the software installed on our PC’s, much like bluepulse manages the widgets on our mobile phones.

You can download the bluepulse client by signing up for an account at www.bluepulse.com . During signup, you’ll be prompted to download the build that best suits your phone.

What are widgets?

Widgets are (again, metaphorically) similar to applications or software that we install on our PC’s. But in this case, bluepulse takes care of most of the plumbing, so all we need to do is select a widget to install, and bluepulse takes care of the rest. Once installed, we can start up multiple widgets, and switch between them, just like we can multitask on our PC’s between multiple applications.

Widgets provide the functionality. We can do things like check our e-mail with the e-mail widget, read news headlines with the RSS reader widget, send and receive instant messages with the messaging widget, and so on.

One of the neat things about bluepulse and widgets is that the platform makes it very easy to add your own widgets, and widgets can be developed in whatever flavor of server-side code you like. Because of this, I expect that we’ll see a large number of new widgets in the coming year, hence the need for BP-Widgets.

You can find widgets available by clicking the Find button. Or, you browse this list of bluepulse widgets, which is irregularly maintained, but included for the benefit of web crawlers.

Why BP-Widgets?

Some widgets are available via defined categories in the bluepulse client. Right now, those categories are “Entertainment,” “Lifestyle,” and “Free.” Other widgets are only available via a keyword that you must enter. As the number of widgets increases, it becomes difficult to not just find widgets, but find the right ones, the ones that meet your needs, the ones that others have used successfully. BP-Widgets helps you discover widgets, and find out what others think about them.

The end goal is to improve the selection and quality of bluepulse widgets, and help our fellow bluepulse users find the best widgets for their phones.