- Image via Wikipedia
Widgets are mini apps that have a single purpose, whether it’s listing the latest stock prices or translating text from one language to another. They use your information to provide news that is relevant to you, including current weather reports and local headlines. They can provide hours of entertainment in the form of games that you can either play by yourself or with someone online.
Many internet browsers, such as Yahoo and Google, allow you to customize your home page with widgets. This way you to always have the information you want available to you whenever you go online. You can arrange the widgets on your homepage however you want, adding new ones and deleting older ones how ever you see fit. This has become so popular that many news services have adopted the same model and offer customizable homepages with their own widgets.
Both Apple and Microsoft have their own widgets that are available for their respective operating systems. Apple uses Dashboard to organize widgets. Dashboard launches with a hot key, displaying all your widgets on screen. When you’re done Dashboard closes. In Windows Vista, Microsoft gadgets (widgets) where located on the Sidebar, but Windows 7 allows you to place them directly onto your desktop and can easily be re-sized to suit your needs. Apple and Microsoft both offer additional widgets through their websites that can be downloaded onto your computer.
You can also get widgets from third party sources. Yahoo and Google have widgets that can be downloaded directly to your desktop. The both have a variety of categories from games to utilities, and you can search through the different categories to find which particular application you want to download. Each one has its own mini review and a description, so you know exactly what it is you’re downloading.
