Blog Category: API/Widgets/Plug-ins
Posted - April 4th, 2008
One thing we haven’t talked about as much as we probably should is our Survey API. They SurveyGizmo API Version 1.0 allows you to query our infrastructure and retrieve responses as well as perform a few operations on the survey itself. This is how our WordPress survey plugin works. The survey API Version 2.0, available any day now, will allow you to interact with the entire SurveyGizmo application programatically. In theory you could even write your own front-end GUI and run a completely private-label version of the app on top of our infrastructure.
In the meantime, you can still do some pretty wicked stuff. The Orange Country Register found us a few months ago with exactly that in mind. Check out their OC Political Pulse page. They use SurveyGizmo to build surveys and collect responses, then render the results in a custom Adobe Flex application built by their crack team of programmers. They are able to allow visitors to drill down into polls and see political data in demographic slices.
BTW, we don’t restrict access to the API. Even Free users can build apps against it. So if you have a particular survey itch that needs to be scratched for your web site, sign up for a free account and give it a whirl.
Posted - July 10th, 2007
We have had a big response to our iPoll application. There have been well over 10,000 hits, and hundreds of users have created polls in the past few days. Now we have added a social networking aspect to iPoll. You can ask the world to cast their vote on your poll, and the world in turn can promote or demote your question based on how worthy they think it is. Current and high ranking polls will float to the top of the list.
Try it out below — you’ll need Firefox, Safari, or IE 7 to use it. IE 6 users should be upgrading anyways ;-)
Yes, you can still mark polls not to be public and send them to just friends, coworkers or customers. Those uses are still fully embraced, but now you can ask a broader audience or even just burn a few minutes surfing and voting while you wait for your train.
http://ipoll.surveygizmo.com
Happy Polling!
Posted - July 5th, 2007
A few days ago we got iPhone fever with the rest of the world. We decided to build a SurveGizmo Mobile Poll application for the iPhone, which you can view at mobile.surveygizmo.com. We learned a few things about developing Web 2.0 applications for the iPhone worth sharing!
Various sources like Gizmodo, FiGMA, and MyiTablet and were reporting iPhone development tips from the recent Apple Developer Conference (WWDC). These tips were helpful but a little misleading. Actually playing with an iPhone changed our approach. Here are some tips we picked up.
10 (+1) Tips for iPhone Applications
#1 Content width
Web pages on the iPhone default to a birds-eye view. This is great when you are browsing CNN.com, but iPhone applications should fill up the entire screen without requiring the user to zoom in and out. Many of the content apps are created to take 100% of the screen and scale down appropriately, but we found this didn’t work well for iPoll, which is just a small page with a form. Here’s the solution, set the viewport metatag. This allows the developer to work in a div of fixed size and tells the iPhone how to render the page.
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=320″ />
#2 Content height
The iPhone browser is designed to scroll with your finger not browser or div scroll bars, so this means that you don’t want to use fixed height designs. We had a lot of trouble with overflow CSS property. We suggest you leave that property alone and let the iPhone do the work.
# 3 Increase the size of form controls
The iPhone uses fingers for making selections. It’s very intuitive but it also makes spacing and sizing your form elements very important, especially for radio buttons and checkboxes. Here is some good news. Safari on the iPhone accepts width and height settings for radio and checkbox controls! It makes them larger and easier to select with your finger. Yes, you can do this with images too, but consider your bandwidth. iPhone apps should be written to work on EDGE.
# 4 Label Tags - still do not work in Safari
Sadly the label tag still does not work correctly on the iPhone. It would be nice, but you’ll have to code around this.
#5 Cache? — Kinda
The iPhone browser does cache content… but it doesn’t help the download speed much. We will do more testing on this, but it seems that every page load creates separate requests for cached content for every external resource (even if previously cached). Likely to do header checks. That’s fine and dandy, but on EDGE it slows things down and your page will not render until all external resources are loaded. So keep your external resource links to a minimum. Use modern design tricks for displaying multiple images from one file, only include the JS libraries that you need, etc.
We also suggest building multiple UI’s into a single file and using JS/CSS to navigate between them rather than moving between pages.
#6 Web 2.0 Javascript libraries - use with caution
The iPhone speed over EDGE can be slow, very slow. We wrote our first version of our Mobile Polls app with Prototype and script.aculo.us, but loading 50-100k of JS proved to not be terribly practical, at least for us. The application was too sluggish to be effective.
#7 Web 2.0 Animation effects
We experienced latency issues that seem to negate the benefit of web 2.0 animation effects like color highlighting, slides, accordions, etc. The effects didn’t seem to keep up and made some UIs unusable.
This is not a problem with the iPhone, really, but be aware that effects occurring after the “onload” event may not render well. They will be competing with whatever mechanism the WebKit uses to thumbnail the page, and you’ll get choppy animation.
#8 Use tab-enabled form elements
The iPhone makes good use of tabbed form controls. The keyboard has a “next” and “back” button for tabbing between them without losing focus on the keyboard. So, use elements like form fields and anchors for interaction rather than divs with onclick handlers. Your users will thank you!
#9 iPhone HTTP User Agent identification
As Mac Rumors reported the iPhone sends this header.
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3
This allows for serving custom content or alternate styles sheets etc. iPhone Geek has already created a helpful php iPhone detection script.
#10 Hover Effects — don’t bother
Since there is no mouse, hover effects don’t work. You’ll need to build UI’s that provide other kinds of clear feedback or at least don’t rely on it. Make your interactive elements very clear.
Bonus Tip (just added) - The “Share” button alternative
The iPhone browser has a feature that Safari does not, a ‘Share’ button that emails your current web address to contacts in your iPhone. Dandy! Sadly, though, the button only appears when editing an URL, not when browsing. Our application needed this functionality (actually, we wanted access to the contact database so we could generate text messages), but we didn’t want to teach people to use the Share feature.
So, remember this ‘old’ trick? Use an old fashioned “mailto” link with &subject= and &body=. This allowed us to provide the same function with a single click on the web app itself, plus we could include some default text.
If you want to use multiple lines you need to use <BR> tags, not escaped line breaks. The iPhone email client is HTML based… it doesn’t respect \n breaks passed in the URL.
Happy iPhone Developing!
Posted - July 4th, 2007
Like thousands of other people across the US, the team here at SurveyGizmo got a bad case of iPhone fever last Friday. We didn’t intend on actually buying the iPhone ourselves — but it was too slick to resist during our visit to the Apple store.
To celebrate the iPhone (and convince our bookkeeper that is was a business expense), we created our own iPhone Application, called iPoll. You can use iPoll to create short one questions polls on your iPhone and send them out to your friends, co-workers and iPhone contacts. It’s totally free.
Do you have an iPhone?
You can try our app by browsing to http://ipoll.surveygizmo.com (don’t forget to bookmark it). This app is *very* lightweight — you can use it over AT&T’s network without getting old and gray waiting for page loads.
For those of you without iPhone, you can still use the application. The iPhone image below is actually a working copy. (The only difference is that the iPhone itself never displays scroll bars.)
One caveat: This was written for the iPhone — so you’ll need Firefox, Safari, or IE 7 to use it. IE 6 users should be upgrading anyways ;-)
COOL! What can I do with iPoll?
Here are some ideas!
- Build your poll on the fly. You can use an iPhone, a web browser, and quite possibly other web-enabled cell phones. You can visit this page or go to http://iPoll.SurveyGizmo.com
- Email your poll to friends, family, coworkers, customers, etc.
- Watch the will of the mob, possibly change your mind, or help make a decision
Here are some examples of what you could do with a mobile poll
Happy Polling!
Posted - June 28th, 2007
We received our first notice of a 3rd party application created with our API. Anyone who uses iGoogle dashboards to organize their lives is going to love this.
Bryan Richards, Editorial Director of Linux Magazine, developed a Google gadget for SurveyGizmo! Just like our Apple Widget and WordPress Plug-in, the gadget displays your surveys and number of responses and allows you to access the advanced features for those surveys by clicking on the row. Excellent job, Bryan!
How to Setup and Use the Google Widget
From your iGoogle home page click on the “add stuff” link (usually at the upper right corner of the screen).
Then choose the “add from URL” option and type (or copy and paste) this URL into the box:
http://bryanjrichard.googlepages.com/sgizmo.xml
Now the SurveyGizmo widget will be added to your iGoogle Home page. You’ll have to enter your API key into the space provided, then you are ready to roll (get your API key from your Account Settings page).
We love to see our customers using our API for cool things. If you’ve created a project without API (or want to) let us know about it. We will rave about your nifty invention.
Thanks Bryan — and great work!!
Posted - May 16th, 2007
So Christian got a wild hair last week (it happens round here) when he heard about a contest for new flash visualizations of digg using their API. For those that don’t know digg is a social networking news site largely for geeks (yep that means us). It has over a million users that “digg” stories out on the web that they like. Popular stories are propoted to the home page when they have enough diggs.
Data flows into digg like ants to a picnic, and they are always looking for new ways to look at or “visualize” the diggs. SurveyGizmo needed a fun little project for kicks and we decided to throw our hat into the ring with HEX.
The hexagonal bars represent individual stories. The higher they are the more diggs. What’s unique about our visualization compared to past ones (labs.digg.com) is that ours is sortable by category. You can see diggs happen in real time from those million+ users each time hex flashes.
Try HEX out here.
Posted - January 10th, 2007
We’re excited to announce the availability of the SurveyGizmo API (version 1.9). It lets you write applications that dynamically interact with your surveys, campaigns and reporting!
The API is available to all customers and plans — from free to enterprise accounts. When you create a new plugin, it becomes available to SurveyGizmo users from our account admin page. Users enable it for their accounts by clicking on the account link and then checking the ‘Activate’ button in the API section. We have already created an Apple Widget and a WordPress Plugin to get you started!
Developers who want to use the API to create: To get started, please read our API document, which outlines all the current calls and has instructions for getting a developer key (free).
Your can download our current API documentation here: SurveyGizmoAPI-V09.doc
We’re very excited to see what you can do with the API. This is just the beginning. We’ll continue to improve the API and open up more features in the next few months. If you come up with a great plugin, application, use or whatnot — let us know — we may blog about it and give you some well-deserved kudos!
Thanks again for everyone’s feedback and patience so far. We know there are still areas for improvement and we are cranking through them one at a time. Some days when we close our eyes we can even see the light at the end of the tunnel — granted, it may just be the glow from our monitors imprinted on our retina.
Posted - October 19th, 2006
Do you run surveys? Do you have a Mac? Then monitoring and managing your surveys is just one keystroke away, thanks to our brand new Apple dashboard widget, developed in partnership with wdgty.
For those of you who unfamiliar with the term, a widget is a mini-application that runs on the Apple OS X Dashboard. You can toggle to your dashboard by pressing the F12 key. Try it! Your Mac comes with a few basic widgets that tell the time, stocks and local weather. Plus, developers around the world are creating some wonderful tools that have integrated widgets — like SurveyGizmo!
About Our Survey Widget
Our groovy little widget is great for keeping an eye on your surveys without keeping a pesky browser window open. We show your basic stats right on the widget, so you can watch the numbers grow as people fill out your survey. In Progress surveys turn into Completed, Abandoned, or Partially Completed. You also have handy links to Create a New Survey or Edit, Reporting, and Preview an existing one.
How to hook your widget up
The only requirement is a Mac with OS X 10.4 (Tiger). (PC users stay tuned for our Yahoo Konfabulator Widget for the PC)
STEP 1
You need to first go to your account screen and click to enable your user API Key. If you don’t have an account, you can create a free account (which has everything a casual surveyor needs — and it’s yours forever).
STEP 2
Download the widget from our widget page or from the Apple site. Save the zip file to your desktop, then double-click the zip file to decompress it. You’ll see the widget appear next to or under the zip. Just double-click the widget itself to place the widget on your dashboard.
STEP 3
Now you’ll need your API key (that thing you took from your account page). Copy and paste your key into the widget configuration screen. (You get the config screen by clicking the “i” on the bottom right hand corner of the widget).
You’re Ready to Rock ‘n Roll!
Yep, that’s all there is to it. Start cranking out those surveys, polls and quizes. If you make a really amazing survey or template (or get stuck trying to do something amazing), let us know! We are dying to see what creative things the Mac community can come up with! Our PC friends seem to like running consumer research surveys, but you can so so much more with SurveyGizmo. Go show ‘em how it’s done!
Special Thanks
Our friends over at wdgty, Stuart and Stephan, did a great job with the widget and we wholeheartedly recommend them. If you are looking for a widget to go with your own web business, try them out. Thanks, guys!
Permanent link to the SurveyGizmo Widget:
SurveyGizmo Widget Page
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Windows PC Users
Sadly, the PC platform doesn’t have native support for widgets, but the free Yahoo Konfabulator is similar. Let us know if you’d like to see a Konfabulator widget.
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Posted - September 22nd, 2006
We now have plugin for WordPress (the wildly popular blogging and website management software). This WordPress Survey Plugin allows you as a blogger to easily integrate surveys in your posts and web pages.
Then, you can then keep an eye on your response stats without having to leave the WordPress Admin Dashboard!
Example: An Embedded Survey
Here is an example of a survey embedded in a post. (Quick Note: although we use WordPress, you can embed a SurveyGizmo survey into any web page or content management system. Just use ‘javascript embed’ as your publishing method.)
Feel free to try it right now. After submitting you’ll stay right on this page — groovy, huh?
Learn more about the plugin or download it here.
Want us to create an add-on or plugin for your CMS? Post a comment and let us know.
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