The Detroit Free Press: Widgets, widgets, everywhere!

21 years ago

“My computer desktop is filled with widgets. And if yours isn’t, I’m betting it soon will be. Widgets — little self-contained programs that automatically open in a window whenever you want with updates and information like news headlines, weather reports and stock tickers — are sweeping the Net. They typically appear as little text boxes or colored little notepads on your desktop whenever you call them up,” Mike Wendland writes for The Detroit Free Press.

“Apple Computer’s new Tiger operating system is responsible for much of the current buzz because of a widget-spewing feature it introduced called Dashboard (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard), which runs as a sort of widget control center,” Wendland writes. “But widgets have been around for a couple of years and are also available for PC and Windows users through programs like Stardock’s DesktopX (http://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx) and Konfabulator (http://www.konfabulator.com), which comes in both Mac and Windows versions. So why do you want a widget? To save you time.”

“Dashboard comes standard with Mac’s Tiger operating system. Konfabulator costs $19.95. DesktopX costs $14.95 for the basic version. One caution: Because widgets are fully executable applications, there’s been some concern that hackers or malicious programmers could somehow exploit them to do harm to your machine. Indeed, Apple had to come up with a security fix last week for Tiger to close such potential vulnerabilities. To avoid such issues, download widgets only from reputable sources,” Wendland writes.

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Note: For Mac OS X Tiger users (and Panther users with Amnesty Widget Browser), the free MacDailyNews Dashboard Widget version 1.1 is available here. The free MacDailyNews Konfabulator widget is available here and works in Konfabulator 2.0 (tested on Mac OS X 10.4.1).