What is a Widget?

Last year when I got my iMac G5, I was getting to know my way around it and all of a sudden a layer of little windows appeared with the latest weather, a solitare game, maps, calendar and a variety of other little gizmos. On the Mac it is called my Dashboard, but after a bit of research, I figured out that these are called widgets - small files that run single applications in individual window that can be customized for your desktop. I'll call them "Geek Toys".

Originally created in 2000 using XML, they were launched for the Mac platform and now using Java, they are available for Windows.

Where do you get these widgets? The name in the game used to be Konfabulator, but it appears that Yahoo! has bought them out. Yahoo! Widgets gallery lets you find widgets and download them, or if you are a widget creator, you can submit them too.

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