Tips and Tricks-March 2006

Widgets, Widgets and More Widgets—Yahoo!

On Friday at work, I happened to notice the screen of one of my colleagues who uses a Mac. The screen was covered with all manner of objects, a calendar, weather reports, news feeds and more. I didn’t have time to ask about it then, but I had picked up a copy of the latest issue of MaximumPC. In it was an article entitled “Modernizing Windows XP.” As I looked through the article, I saw an image of a screen that resembled what I saw on his screen, Yahoo Widgets. Bingo!

I went to the site at http://widgets.yahoo.com to find out more. First, you do not have to be a Yahoo user to use their widgets. You start by downloading the Yahoo Widgets Engine. It’s not a large download and the instructions on the web page include what to do if you didn’t read all the instructions before you did the download and it didn’t work. Included with the engine are about 10-15 widgets.

What’s a widget you might ask? These are basically little JavaScript applications that use the Yahoo Widget Engine to run. You may have known the engine under its old name, Konfabulator. The format is open, so there are multitudes of these things. Yahoo maintains them in a gallery that groups the widgets into categories and you can search for specific widgets. It’s a little daunting because there are thousands of widgets in the gallery. You can find RSS Feeds from sources in Poland, Turkey, Malaysia, and even for Al Jazeera. You can track your favorite cricket league, view cruise ship webcams from 14 ships that cruise the Caribbean.

One of the more practical widgets puts weather in your location on the screen.

Another widget that seemed practical to me is a volume control that includes a mute button. I like it because it’s there all the time and doesn’t require me to pick it out of the array of icons in the taskbar.

The slider is accessible and quick. The mute button is available for when the phone rings and I want to hear the phone conversation.

There is also a set of widgets that allows you to make use of your Yahoo. You can have your Yahoo calendar, contacts and more available on your desktop. Yahoo provides its users with an online notepad. You can make notes on your local workstation and those notes will be available to you from another computer. The widget makes it easy to add the notes without having to actually go to the Yahoo web page.

You can create new folders and organize your notes as well. Note the tabs for adding your notes to a couple of blogging sites.

One of the best features of the Yahoo Widgets is that you can opt to show the widgets only in the “Heads Up Display.” The widgets will be invisible on your desktop and when you want to see them, you use the F-8 key and the widgets will appear over a transparent version of your desktop. This makes it possible for you to have a multitude of these running without having your desktop completely covered (now if they could only do that for my real desktop).

Here’s the last example, a shot from the bridge cam of the Golden Princess. The widget is called “Cruise the Caribbean” but it really has images from most of the ships in the Princess cruise line, so you will see everything from ships docked in San Francisco, en route to Hawaii or Tahiti and all the places Princess cruises. You can control the duration of the images and you can manually page through the shots. When I looked there was even a ship docked in San Francisco.

These are fun and some are even useful. They actually do not use much in the way of resources—there is a meter that shows CPU usage and memory. They are available for PCs and Macs.

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Copyright 2005

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