Cute l’tl thingies on ur desktop
| Thursday, April 27th, 2006 | --sundar |
Today would've drawn a blank, almost. Folks were perhaps busy doing hacks or recovering from the hack fever. That's when I thought of talking about Yahoo! Widgets, "the coolest thing Yahoo! did in recent times" (in a non-yahoo friend's words). It's a nice platform on which 1000s of little thingies have been built by developers. Those widgets do just about everything you'd want them to do on a desktop. Just go download them and check the weather, your mails, or watch a random slideshow from flickr.
Want more? You could write one using simple XML and some JavaScript. It's as easy as writing a config file. I'm not kidding. Just to find out myself, I wrote up a widget that displays random couplets from Thirukkural, written by the ancient Tamil poet/philosopher Thiruvalluvar, along with English translations by G.U. Pope. It took me just a couple of hours. (That I missed the evening cab drop is a different issue, though.) You can download the Kural widget (also here) and mail me any bouquets or brickbats. Just install the widget engine from http://widgets.yahoo.com/download/ before that. A screenshot's here.
May 5th, 2006 at 10:45 am
I must agree that the Yahoo widgets are great. I thought I’d be annoyed by them at first, because they tend to be a bit, how do you say it, a bit “bubbly” (i run windows in classic because i hate the bubbly nature of XP). But they’re actually quite nice to have around, the standard weather and yahoomail notifier being particular faves. I use them on mac and pc equally. If I remember correctly, there was a push around 1999/2000 for “channel-like” doo-hickeys on the desktop that really resembled what yahoo widgets are doing (and also what apple dashboard does) but I don’t think this ever flew well with the general public. Until now…
May 5th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Heh. To be honest, I kinda agree. Maybe i’ve been using Big Brother’s OS of choice for too long, but I like boxy, plain looking widgets. Arlo and most of the folks responsible for things Widgety are Mac folks and visual designers. They prefer far more appealing desktop toys.
Still, the nice thing about widgets is that there’s precious little stopping you from cracking them open, reskinning them to something less precious and submitting them back.
I should probably do that with some of the ones I use, shouldn’t I?
May 7th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
Even better would be to build themes that work across widgets. Hmm …
May 14th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Kudos, let the world be benefitted more out of your work.