Intel Mash Maker Makes Web Browsing Fun Again

By: Jennifer Hong
Staff Writer
Published: Apr 22, 2008

Intel Mash Maker creates a toolbar in your Web browser which can suggest different pre-made visualization tools that you can view on different Web pages.

Intel Corporation has announced a new product, dubbed Mash Maker, which will allow users to pin widgets to a Web page from their Web browser.

The Mash Maker Widget API allows you to easily create your own Widgets. These widgets can visualize data, add data to the page, communicate with other widgets, import data from other sources, and generally do interesting things with web pages.

Since there are only a finite number of pre-made tools, Intel's other big selling points is that you can design your own mash-ups. You can also use the expert controls to reload the configuration file, change the sharing status, or delete a previously registered widget.

The settings panel runs in a different iframe to the main widget iframe, but use the Widget API to share settings information. If one frame calls setSettings then the settings are passed to the other frame using the mashmaker_widget_settings entry point.

Yahoo allows users to create their own mash-ups of RSS feeds using Yahoo Pipes, and users have created some useful things such as custom hot deal finders, Flickr filters and Twitter search functionality.

Mash Maker is a big departure for Intel, which is known mainly for it hardware, and it's also not completely clear yet how it will stand out from the similar Greasemonkey, the popular Firefox add-on.