Friday, December 23, 2005

Desktop Widgets

I have discovered a great tool made by Yahoo! - the Yahoo! Widget Engine. It seems that Widgets are the next thing on PC / Apple Mac desktops. A Widget is a small tool that can display all sorts of information such as:
  • Latest news via RSS or a direct site feed
  • Web cam images
  • Weather
  • Sudoku
and more. It's great to have these tools on your desktop, as its the quickest way to get the information that you need, and have it at your fingertips. It's nice to see someone come up with a tool that's great. My desktop currently has 3 widgets - a Stock Widget to display my share prices, a Day Planner overview, which connects to my calendar in Thunderbird, taking the info from the calendars in there, and an RSS feed widget, to display the news I want on my desktop.

I have also created 2 widgets. One displays the latest posts to my blog, and the other the latest entries to the discussion groups I run at Yahoo! Groups (Boney M Discussion List, James Last Discussion List and Goombay Dance Band Discussion List) If you want the widget for this blog, you can download it from my personal website, and the widget for my Yahoo! Groups is available in the files section of each group.

To get the Yahoo! Widget Engine visit http://widget.yahoo.com

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