Yet More Desktop Thingamabobs
Microsoft today announced their platform for little desktop doohickeys: Microsoft Gadgets.
Great, now we’ve got four completely incompatible systems of desktop utilities:
- Microsoft Gadgets, Windows only (plus Windows mobile devices and Start.com “Web gadgets”)
- Yahoo! Widgets (aka Konfabulator widgets), Windows and OS X
- Apple OS X Dashboard Widgets, OS X only
- GNOME gDesklets, Linux only
So if you want to develop widgets for the mass market, which one do you pick? Or do you do your widget for all four?
Hooray for walled gardens! (Sigh)
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Comments
Sandy
September 13, 2005
5:11 pm
If it’s any consolation, I find widgets borderline useless. They need a more integrated solution, like the DAs of OS 6. Those little things could be pulled up from a menu and acted almost like an application, except they left entirely when you clicked away their window.
Like a calculator I could pull up and use even while I have focus on something else in the OS. Konfabulator can kinda/sorta do that, but not well enough to put up with their runtime environment.