“Widgets” are yet another innovation that came to life in the Mac world and spread beyond to the real world. They come in an amazing variety of functions, facilities, and forms. They vary from completely useless to essential to (your) life. And they come at no charge. Get some widgets now.
Widgets are mini applications, or applets, that run in the background on your computer. A basic example is a clock displayed on your desktop (the desktop is what you see if you have no applications started or if you minimise all of your open applications) – choose from old-fashioned analogue clocks to groovy digital ones. See just the time, or see the time, date, and other information.
The underlying concept is a neat one – you install and run a base application, sort of a widget player. Then you choose which widgets you want to run by browsing through a website and downloading the interesting ones. Add these to your list of widgets in the base widget player, and they start up and do their thing. Customise each one to only show on the desktop or to be visible over the top of anything else you display on your screen. Customise further to make each widget transparent to whatever degree you like, and/or to fix it in a certain location on your screen.
Thousands of widgets have been created by thousands of people. Webcams to view live traffic in a city centre. Photo frames that scroll through your personal photos or randomly display images from a website. Live stock quotes, commodity prices and current weather conditions. Digital or analogue displays of computer battery power, hard-disk space, memory usage and wireless connection signal strength. Random quotes from the Bible or famous people. Online radio stations. Calculators and currency converters. Earthquake maps. Time countdown to some event. The list is truly amazing.
Widgets come as part of the latest Mac operating system (the Mac OS X), having originally started life there a couple of years ago. Windows users have to steal this good idea by downloading a (legally) free application from Yahoo!, after the company who created the widget player for Windows saw astounding success with its application, called Konfabulator. Now known as Yahoo! Widgets, you will need to visit widgets.yahoo.com in order to download the widget player (make sure you read all the install questions properly, and say “No” to all the Yahoo advertising stuff you don't want). Then peruse the Widgets Gallery and choose the ones you like.
The widget player is quite easy to use and configure, and offers helpful advice and information when first started. You will probably only want to run half a dozen or so of your favourite widgets, to avoid unduly taxing your computer while it's doing other more important stuff for you (eg. emails, or word processing). Make sure you are happy to have any widgets requiring internet access (eg. weather updates) as they may affect your internet charges depending on your internet account.
Widgets can be one of those “why didn't someone come up with that before?” facilities that are really what computers are for ; making life easier, more fun, or a little bit more interesting. Try them out.
Questions? - Merlin Pacific IT provide effective & efficient business IT. Join VIGNET (Vanuatu Internet User Group) email discussions, register at tinyurl.com/zcusl
