Yahoo Widget Engine is incredibly cool, light-weight, easy to use and totally free tool from Yahoo which can turn your desktop into a wonderland for your mouse cursor. By using it you can install all sorts of widgets (aka Yahoo Widgets) which are small resource-friendly programs which can be either
- a tool to play around on your desktop, i.e. alarm clock, calculator, games, battery life indicator, interactive memory meter, remote control to your media player and etc, OR
- serve as a bridge between your desktop and regularly visited services (email, weather, news, blogs, web calendars, …) by getting all updates and notifications to your desktop screen.
Widgets on my screen:
Yahoo widgets in a way similar to Google gadgets which I have talked about in google desktop review . The only difference and quite major one is that most of yahoo widgets are quite well designed and can be positioned around the screen as you like. Google gadgets on the other hand are integrated into desktop sidebar and have no unique look. So if you are looking for something more unique and customizable yahoo widgets is the way to go.
There are many widgets to choose from , categorized into following categories; Fun & Games, Date & Time, News Feeds, System Utilities, Sight & Sound, Geek stuff, Cam Viewers, Widget Tools, App Enhancers, Search Tools and Various. Once you get some widgets running you can customize each of them via right click menu. For instance, frequently used widgets can be set to transparent mode and to appear on top of all other open windows, this way you can have all of your widgets in sight without losing precious desktop space.
Oh, I have designed a widget for MakeUseof as well, it isn’t an awesome looking one but I am quite sure it looks better than 90% of available widgets. Check it out below, if you like it you can download it from yahoo widget gallery here (after installing Yahoo Widget Engine).
Enjoy!
Some additional links: FAQ section, widget workshop, RSS feeds for windows widgets / MAC widgets (use your feedreader to stay up-to-date on widgets).
Oops I can see light outside, off to bed.
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Yahoo Widgets can make you pc work very solw.
Yeap if your system is short on RAM it’s important to keep number of running widgets low, I guess anything below 5 should be fine. However, keep in mind that depending on the purpose each widget consumes different amount of system resources. In some cases one particular widget may occupy as much memory as several other widgets combined.