Yahoo Widgets 4 Trumps Vista, OS X

This morning, Yahoo announced the release of Yahoo Widgets 4, the company's platform for web-enabled mini apps on the desktop. It's a cross-platform release, with (required) desktop engines available for Windows and Mac OS X. This is only the second major release that Yahoo has put together since purchasing the Konfabulator platform on 2005.

Since those nascent days, widgets have really become a hit. First, they were incorporated into the Mac OS X desktop, then the Windows Vista desktop. Around the same time, independent engines like Konfabulator and DesktopX challenged the bigger players. Since that initial big bang, browser widgets built in JavaScript or Flash have become an integral to the ecosystems of social networks, personalized homepages and blogs.

It's not surprising that the newest release of Yahoo Widgets bears an even closer resemblance to Mac Dashboard and Vista Sidebar. It's becoming more and more apparent that Apple pretty much set the standard for widgets design and behavior on the desktop, so it's interesting to see how Yahoo/Konfabulator have spun around and caught up to a race they started.


There's a new Widget Dock, which is exactly what you'd expect: a simple "launch bar" that can be placed along any edge or in any corner on your display. Widgets are managed there -- you can hide, delete or set preferences on any widget by right-clicking the dock. Yahoo Widgets 4 installs with a Flickr widget and a widget search widget. If you have a Flickr account, the Flickr widget can be set up to display your own photos through a simple authentication process. It took my 2 minutes to set mine up.

The discovery widget is a nice touch. You can search for new widgets and add them to your stack right there in the dock. It couldn't be simpler. Within five minutes, I added a few widgets (baseball news tracker, solar eclipse calculator, binary clock) and had everything configured.

Anyone who uses the built-in widget engines on a Mac or a Vista machine isn't going to be blown away. But as a Mac user, I'm impressed. First of all, Apple Dashboard can be a huge memory hog. I usually turn it off when I'm capturing audio, running Photoshop or working under a load. And the widgets are almost always slow and unresponsive. Yahoo's widgets are much snappier.

Yahoo's widget library is extensive, and the fact that you can install widgets without opening a browser is a huge bonus. Yahoo widgets can be managed with a right-click, something that Dashboard doesn't offer. The platform even has a head's up view. Hit F8, which works just like Dashboard's F12.



I must admit that my experience with Vista gadgets is far more limited than my experience with Dashboard. But from spending time in both Yahoo's platform and Microsoft's desktop environment, I like Yahoo's better. I think the real winners on the Windows side are XP users who want to add a Vista-like widget engine to their desktops. Yahoo gets the rebound and the basket.

It will be interesting to see which direction widgets on the desktop go in the next few years. Apple's next operating system, due this summer, should improve widget performance. Chances are, the Vista widgets community will continue to grow. Offerings from Dekoh Desktop, which uses Java, and apps built on Adobe's Apollo platform could really shake things up in the near future.