Believe it or not, the original widget engine was called Konfabulator and this toolkit enabled you to drop standalone widgets (or gadgets) on your desktop. Better still, it was available for both Windows and the Mac. For many, including us, it was a far more effective widgets manager than either the Vista sidebar or even the Mac-based dashboard. Yahoo bought Konfabulator and it was renamed the Yahoo Widget Engine. It's still impressive software as it enables you to drop the widgets on your desktop and place on any location.

Yahoo Widget Engine 4.5.2 is the latest version and is still worth consideration. We use Yahoo Widget Engine to power a CPU meter and weather widgets on our desktop. The opacity is set low, so they don't interface with open desktop applications. If you look through the Yahoo widget library there's bound to be a widget you'll find interesting for your computer.

Yahoo Widget Engine link.

27 Feb 2009