To Dev or not to Dev

While working with a client recently I noticed he was running some interesting desktop widgets. He pointed me to the Yahoo Widgets website and I've been hooked ever since. There is a few sidebar and widgets systems out there and I am not sure how I missed this particular one, as I have never been a big fun of Yahoo's software, however the Widget Engine is in short quite brilliant.

The Yahoo Widget engine has a very small memory footprint, and each widget is highly configurable. All widgets can be locked to the desktop and it also allows for transparency to be set independently on each widget. Another nice feature is the F8 hotkey which allows all the widgets to come to the front, and a widget can also be set to only display when the F8 is pressed.

Each widget runs as a separate application, and therefore does not stop the widget engine or other widget from running when it "crashes". In testing one or two of the older widgets this turned out to be a very useful feature. Another neat feature of the widget engine is that it runs on both Mac and Windows. It also support Windows Vista, and althought I prefer the Desktop Sidebar, noticing the memory usage on it recently I am considering trying the Widget engine as a replacement for a few days.

So if your anything like me and like gadgets on your desktop or something different, head over to the Yahoo Widget website and begin playing with the 3800+ widgets already available.