Hi,

When I started this project I had the idea that it would be a fairly popular widget, that would be easy to create, and I could sell it on Nokia's OVI store. Unfortunately, that was hardly the case.

I have written the widget in Python, which usually makes things easier, but in this case made things much harder. When I started, I was the first person using Python to write home widgets for Fremantle. By definition, there were a lot of problems getting started, almost all of which have since been now sorted out. I had to file numerous bugs with Python and work with the Python team (who are fantastic, by the way) just to get home widgets working.

On top of that the documentation was very thin so I had to figure out the API's mostly without any help -- this took lots of time and work. I even had to buy a device to be able to fully test things. This set me back several hundred dollars.

Finally, I was able to get developing at a steady pace and was ready to release my widget to OVI. Except, where is OVI? On top of it not even existing yet, I started hearing things like you need to be incorporated to even join OVI and you need Million-dollar liability insurance. Maybe it was poor planning on my part, but I needed to find an alternative.

The alternative was to incorporate Ads into Google search results (heck, they will be there anyway) so that I could try to offset some of my costs. So that is what I did. I released it for free instead of for the (small) fee I was planning with the one compromise being a Google CSE instead of regular results.

It wasn't my first choice, but seemed like a decent compromise.