Yahoo Widgets !

I was a big fan of Google Desktop. It is in sync with Google’s philosophy of simple and elegant. Google Desktop, though cool and useful is a bit bland… It was a good experience and the fact that they were releasing the Google Desktop SDK excited the programmer in me too. But the current SDK download is a version in Visual Studio .NET project files which kind of put me off and I stated looking for greener pastures.

Recently I read an article by Gerry McGovern which says – “E-marketing is about substance over show, logic over emotion, text over graphics. Good Web marketers follow the Google motto: be useful”. But I, as an erstwhile employee of Macromedia Inc. beg to differ. If the same/similar substance can be packaged in a better way so as to give an enhanced user experience, there’s nothing like it… or as in Macromedia we used to say “Experience Matters”. This is exactly why Yahoo Widgets blew me away…

Yahoo Widgets were a offshoot of Yahoo acquiring Konfabulator.com. It is an amazing utility and comes with a Yahoo! Widget Engine which can be downloaded easily. Then you can add plugin like programs with enhanced visual experiences to attain the utility level of Google Desktop plugins and more…

The widgets range from the usual calendar, organizer, clock, notes ones to yahoo specialties like weather and stocks. I liked the stocks widget very much because it can access real-time stock prices from almost 25 different markets around the globe, unlike Google which has it for only NASDAQ and NYSE. For laptop users, there is a battery widget that will give you a visual indication of your laptop battery. Check out more of these in the Widget Gallery. The only advantage that i saw of Google Destop plugin that announces and indexes emails form Outlook for better search purposes. But this takes up a lot of space on the local machine and makes it very slow.

But what excited me most was that Yahoo too was giving us a way to program our own widgets. It comes with a widget called Widget Converter that can convert a .widget file into the source code and back. A very ingenious method indeed. The code is in simple Yahoo proprietary XML (I work in Flex which is written in Macromedia proprietary XML) and JavaScript, easily reprogrammable to suit our needs. It has an easy to understand tutorial and other helping hands at the Widget Workshop

I cannot wait to explore more…