Hi,
A few days ago, I came across the Twitter Gmail Gadget. It has a neat interface with all data displayed inside Gmail; no external pages, etc. Since Gmail Gadgets are also opensocial applications, they have a canvas view, in addition to the profile view that show up on the side bar. The canvas view takes up the larger part of the screen.
We were also running out of space at the bottom of the gadget that had cryptic options to set the various parameters. The latest release has just one link at the bottom of the gadget visible on the left pane. Clicking on this takes you to the larger details view that opens in the right pane.
The right pane shows the statistics recorded in Google Calendar. It also has a tab showing the visits recorded by bit.ly. If a URL is not configured, there is text in the tab trying to explain how URL trackers like bit.ly can be used and how a bit.ly URL can be configured inside the gadget.
As far as the code is concerned, the change was not much. Previously, the two pages were opened using window.open. Now, they are simply shown as iFrames inside the tab pages. The height of the gadget is also adjusted after user actions for aesthetics.
If your gadget has not refreshed automatically, you may have to delete your existing gadget and add a new instance. This sure may delete the total time shown, but that should be fixed in the next release. I am also planning to have a home page for the gadget site hosted on Google App engine.
