Ok so it’s interesting to see that Microtsoft followed Apple’s Dashboard lead with it’s pathetic gadget solution. However both pale in comparison to Yahoo’s Widget engine. I am currently running y!w on both Windows and Mac, without much issue. Althoughnow that I finally upgraded to Leopard I do miss my Day Planner, even after several major OS updates Yahoo still has not fixed the errors with this widget from their defualt set. Otherwise on all of the systems that I use I have subsequently replaced/disabled the built-in widget facility and erplaced it with Yahoo’s.
I have to ask the question: When oh when will these OS manufacturers figure it out that they do not need to create these half assed software packages when there is a superior alternative already available.
Had Microsoft dumped the gadgets and struck a financial deal w/ Yahoo to commercially license their widget engine as an option, Vista might have failed a bit less. Of course Yahoo might not be in the straights it’s in right now as a result. I wonder what would have happened if Apple did the same thing? But let’s face it that these widgets aren’t really anything new. Many of the window managers that run on top of the X Windowing System found on UNIXes like FreeBSD, and many Linuxes have applets. Handy lightweight mini applications that perform specific tasks.
In any event I thought it might be a good idea to cover a few of the y!widgets that I find useful, click the embedded image to jump to the widget’s source page.
IP Subnet Calculator
COLOURLovers COlor Picker
I’ll add more later.