Kyle Hayes continues to improve his open source Amazon sidebar widget. The widget, which we've covered before, allows you to display a list of books according to their sales rank at Amazon. It looks great, and now includes new features: clicking on an item in the list will fade the item out and show you the details about the book, including the cover art and a link to Amazon.com to purchase the item. The widget is embeded in the page below, and is also on the right hand side of the front page here at RIA Pedia.

The project is an open source project hosted on RIAForge, so if you're interested in improving it, you can submit bugs and patches to Kyle through that system. I'd like to see a few things added in the next release: added support for affiliate links, so I get money if someone buys from my site, and user preferences for the widget, to specify which store they want to purchase from. It would be great if the preferences for the widget were stored in the local storage mechanism for the Flash Player, and if the preferences were behind the widget itself, like with Dashboard Widgets on Mac OS X.