Unless you live under a rock, you probably have seen widgets. Mainly widgets are more popular on Mac then PC of course. But now more and more PC developers are coming up with widgets as well, like screen ruler, google desktop, news alerts and etc.
As some of you may have already noticed, I get all hyped up as soon as there is a useful widget in the market. I am sure most of you have seen OSX like toolbar on my machine from objectdock.com.
In 2005 I fooled around with their version of widgets called DesktopX Widgets. I found it to be vary flaky and not fully supported. Not to mention that it only came as paid version and just 1 week sampler.
If you are like me and enjoy widgets greatly, then you should check out widgets.yahoo.com. Basically you download the “Widget Engine”, and then download any widgets from their gallery or any where off the web. It uses PNG for transparent imagery which makes their widgets very sexy.
There is a full developer area called Workshop which has SDK and minimal documentation but tons of example widgets.
Once you download the SDK you primarily need a file called “Converter.exe” or “Converter_4a.exe” which lets you inflate or deflate your dot widget file. Inside the widget file there is dot kon file with XML and JavaScript which allows you to create very sexy widget with simple API.
Do download the SDK and check out many sample widgets, there are some interesting widgets like calendar which uses outlook calendar in the widget.
Another thing worth mentioning is the Yahoo Developer Network at developer.yahoo.com, it a lot of use full data. Contains many API’s for maps and sort as well as syndication urls for getting quotes, news, weather, jobs and traffic rss feeds.
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