Back in the early days of Joost we had a downloadable client. Back in those “old” days we also used to have something called “widgets”. Times have changed, but widgets are still an interesting concept, thus we’ve been toying around with widgets in our Flash based player.

Here is an example Twitter search widget:

It’s a pretty basic example of a widget that uses the underlying video’s metadata to search on Twitter for things related to the video and display tweets on top of it.

Technically widgets are separate SWF files that are loaded by the Joost Player and displayed on top of the video. The Joost Player then exposes a simple API to the widgets:

• video metadata: title, description, duration, etc
• current time in the video, meaning that time based interaction is possible
• ability to play/pause videos

That means that anything you can do in Flash, you can do in a widget plus you can access information about the underlying video.

We’ll be posting an alpha version of the “Widget API” soon, so this is just a teaser so far

We’re happy to announce yet another Joost Labs project today: a version of Joost customized for running on the Sony PlayStation 3.

It makes it a lot easier to play Joost content on a PlayStation 3 by presenting a simplified interface that allows you to navigate content using the controller. It does not have full EPG navigation, but you can browse our Joost Picks and popular content, and also search for shows. NB: Note that this is a Joost Labs project, so your mileage might vary We are, for example, aware of the playback occasionally not working.

To use it, go to the Network icon on your PlayStation, open the Internet Browser and press the Start button which will open the Address input field where you enter:

http://labs.joost.com/tv/

You can save time by bookmarking it using the Select button.

The keys on the controller have the following functions:

Basic:

• Up/Down: Vertically navigate through the menus
• Left/Right: Horizontally switch between the main menu, video list, and video info
• X: The only button you can use to select menu items

Advanced:

• Hold X down: Show the video controls
• X + Up: fullscreen
• X + Down: Pause
• X + Left/Right: Previous/Next show in the video list
• O: Exit fullscreen

As always we’re happy to hear about comments and suggestions.