About two days ago, Yahoo made Yahoo Widgets 4 available for download. As soon as I found out about it today, I wasted no time and immediately downloaded the widget application engine which is an upgrade of the formerly known Yahoo Konfabulator with its newly added widget dock and minimal memory usage. I have never seen so much widgets, in all my geeky existence. Yahoo actually did a good job of categorizing the different widgets based on the functionalities. With the added dock, Yahoo made it easy for users to customize the widgets by customizing the preferences. The widget dock itself can be set to collapse or to hide automatically.
Wait a minute, what is a widget? A widget is just a little file usually represented by icons or graphic symbols and it does pretty much any function that is assigned to it such as a calculator, a desktop calendar, a currency converter, a mail checker, a music player, a shortcuts folder, a daily reminder, a site updater, an RSS feed aggregator, etc.
With these widgets made available, your computing life is made ten times more convenient because these widgets can be set to sit on your desktop and with just one click of your mouse, summon them to display or perform their assigned function.
When did multi-tasking become so much fun? I tell you, the widgets can be arranged in a wonderful fashion such that they may also serve as a nice desktop enhancement. They’re really visually appealing, and at the same time, functional.
With all the many widgets to choose from, it was so easy to get widget-happy and just download as many widgets as you can. Some widgets though that were presented more or less serve the same functions so it’s up to the user to decide which widget to add to Yahoo’s own preset widgets. The endless list of widgets is made possible by many contributors or widget authors who dared and bothered to upload their own widgets for the consumption of the internet market for free. The fact that Yahoo featured these individual authors gave these programmers a chance to shine and be infamous in the widget category. This also gave us users a little hope on the safety of these widgets having been included in Yahoo’s category list, however, it is still the user’s sole responsibility to make sure that the widgets that are downloaded are free of malicious bugs that may harm their system.
Guess what? I was too overwhelmed and didn’t realize that I downloaded most of the widgets that were made available in the Yahoo widgets directory. Here, I’ll give you a rundown of the different widgets that are sitting on my desktop right now:
- Affirmation Planet
- Crawling Ant
- Daily Tips
- Draw Demo
- FunMass Game Downloads
- Hangman
- iTunes Bar
- iTunes Companion
- Kalc
- Memory Cards
- Mess-O-Notes
- Neon Gauges System Info
- Phone Notify
- Picture Frame
- Teddy Bear
- Translation Dictionary Toy
- Vista Meter-CPU
- Vista Meter-Memory
- Widget of Change
- Widget of Happiness
- WiFi Signal
All that, apart from the preset Yahoo widgets. To make it easy for me to view all my widgets, I also added the Widget Launcher which displays a listing of all my widgets.
So how’s my computing time now with all these widgets sitting on my desktop? As I listen to iTunes, I can see a picture that is randomly displayed inside the Picture Frame. My affirmation message today says, “My inner vision is always clear and focused.” The Translation Dictionary Toy that I set to translate English to French displays “nowadays = de nos jours”. The Daily Tips is showing one health tip that says “Wake up at the same time everyday.” I can see my Wi-Fi signal strength and my resource meter indications both for CPU and for memory, while a red ant busily crawls around my screen. There’s more that I can use when I need to and I’m glad that these tiny little widgets are making my geek world a little more interesting.
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