Some people like to keep things neat and tidy on their computers, avoiding clutter and  limiting distractions.

Others like to have one or two fun things and daily essentials at their fingertips, and still others like to fill up their screens with so much useless "flare" that people walk by the monitor and get the inexplicable urge to order a basket of onion rings and a plate of fajitas.

Those of you in the third party will be pleased to know that Google is going to make it even easier to put occasionally useful mini-apps at your fingertips.

30 Nov 2007

The search engine maker/advertising kingpin/cloud computing proponent/buzzword factory announced today that it will be porting its Gadgets program to the Mac. Gadgets are little tiny apps that display one snippet of information, such as the current temperature or a list of sports scores.

Mac users already know these sort of apps as "Widgets." They can be downloaded from Apple's website and run with Dashboard.

Fortunately, the Google Gadgets are also going to run on Dashboard, so those of you that can't find what you're looking for in the thousands of useless Dashboard widgets can now sift through the thousands of useless Google Gadgets.