Yahoo's purchase of Konfabulator introduced a wider audience to widgets, nifty little applications that sit on your desktop and provide information or entertainment. Are they hard to make? And could they be useful to your site? Keep reading to find out.
A World of Widgets
Most of you will know that Yahoo! bought the popular Widget engine Konfabulator about a year ago. Prior to this, it began (commercial) life in early 2003 as a small but hugely successful Mac application aimed at providing any information you wanted in skinnable form right on your desktop. Release 1.8 saw the application ported to the Windows platform, while version 2.1 saw it transformed into freeware. The cross-platform nature of the widgets themselves ensured a steady stream of new and uniquely entertaining widgets produced by both Windows and Mac users alike, until it became so popular that the developers sold it to Yahoo! so that it could be effectively distributed to the masses.
This is obviously just a one paragraph description of the JavaScript engine. The Konfabulator site has a far cooler, comic strip cartoon written by the original designers themselves that explains the story brilliantly for those of you that are interested. Since acquisition, Konfabulator was renamed to the Yahoo! Widget Engine when version 3 was released in December 2005, and the current version is 3.1. Most of the widgets themselves have a very distinctive semitransparent black glass default appearance, inherited from the OSX Aqua GUI, although most are skinnable and or highly customizable. When you install either the standard widget engine or the SDK you get a selection of basic widgets, including a weather forecaster, analogue clock and various other little information providers that can either use data from the host computer or from the Internet. If these don't satisfy your needs, there are already thousands of downloadable widgets to choose from on the http://widgets.yahoo.com site.
You can get widgets in all shapes and sizes that give you information about almost anything! Recently there were a lot of World Cup themed widgets that predict the winners of the tournament, or give team specific news and updates; there are also plenty of map and weather combos that report on all aspects of weather (standard weather reports/forecasts, pressure and temperature reports, etc) for given states/locations, and plenty of industry specific news feed scrollers. Clock and countdown variations are also a common theme for widgets, as are online radio stream players.
There is also a wealth of fun related widgets that do nothing more than amuse or entertain. Some of the better ones I've seen so far include the Coder/Decoder widget that you and a friend can download to have coded conversations, the AmazonBrowser which gives you a fully functional Amazon.com on your desktop, and ICDocs which allows you to view Office documents without an installed copy of MS Office. There are many, many more and as with the ICDocs example, not all widgets make use of external online feeds or data sources; many use properties of your system to function.
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