The Internet has become such an indispensable resource that it's truly hard to imagine how we ever got along without it. These days nearly any type of information is as close as a Web site or Net-connected utility, but in this frenetic world, who wants to have to fire up a browser window or maximize a background application a few dozen times a day?
Enter Yahoo! Widget Engine, a utility formerly known as Konfabulator that is essentially a JavaScript Runtime engine designed to host small applets called widgets. These widgets can perform all sorts of different functions or provide a variety of information culled from the host system or from various online sources via XML. Yahoo! Widget Engine is available in both Windows (2000/XP) and Mac (OS X) versions, and while previous versions imposed a registration fee, since being purchased by Yahoo! the software is now available completely free of charge.
Widget Engine Setup
On its own, Yahoo! Widget Engine doesn't really do much. Rather, the program gets its power from the countless and varied widgets that you can install on top of the base software. You automatically get access to a handful of widgets when you install Yahoo! Widget Engine, but to really take full advantage of the program you need to visit the Konfabulator Widget Gallery at www.widgetgallery.com. At the time of this writing there are nearly 2,000 different widgets available for download from the site (mostly created by individual programmers).
Downloading and installing widgets is extremely simple. When you install Yahoo! Widget Engine, it creates a My Widgets folder within My Documents where you can download widgets to and then execute the widgets directly from there. Most widgets are compatible with either Mac or Windows, though many are Windows-only and there are even a few that are Mac-specific. (The platform compatibility is clearly indicated for each widget.)
You can also search for widgets by category or keyword, and even display all the creations from a particular author. To gage a given widget's worth before downloading, you can reference the number of downloads as well as comments left by previous users.
Although they're applications in the strictest sense, Konfabulator widgets aren't bound by the conventional Windows or Mac look-and-feel. Each widget is graphically distinct with its own unique shape, colors, and visual effects, and blends right into the desktop (i.e. borderless windows).
