I love widgets!
For those who haven't heard of these tiny little helper programs, a widget is an applet (an application running in the context of another application - such as a Java applet running inside a browser) that runs on your desktop.
Widgets will usually show information in a graphical way, or will show data from a web service or an RSS feed.
I usually have at least a calendar available, along with some CPU/memory statistics. Sometimes I add weather, news feed etc.
I'm running 3 operating systems: XP, Vista and Mac OS 10.4. Each has its own widget engine:
Windows XP  XP has many engines available, but the most common by far is Konfabulator (bought by Yahoo and renamed to Yahoo Widgets). A gallery of available widgets can be found here and there are literally thousands available. PS: each widget runs as a separate process, so you can use task manager or Process Explorer to make sure not too many resources are consumed by your "helper" applications. |
Windows Vista  In Vista, these are called "gadgets" and reside in the sidebar - a new Vista feature, that is part of the operating system.More gadgets for Vista can be found here |
Mac OS X  On the Mac, widgets are also part of the operating system and can be shown or hidden quite easily, using a feature called "dashboard". You can find some mac widgets here. PS: there's a version of Yahoo Widgets for Mac as well - allowing for cross-platform widgets. |
Development
Widgets are usually easy to develop. They are written in a mixture of JavaScript and XML (that means you can use a text editor to write them). It's the task of the engine to parse the file and render the widget - allowing for cross-platform widgets (or easy conversions).
Konfabulator even provides a "my-first-widget" wizard. Think of any information you may want to show on the desktop, and you can develop a widget to show it.
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