What Is A Widget?

Being a geek can be kind of funny: sometimes you find things that are so cool and so new that everyone else just “doesn’t get it.” For example, take widgets (including web widgets and desktop widgets). Back in 2000 the idea of a so-called widget was very new and unknown to most people, but fast-forward to 2007 with Mac OS X and Windows Vista supporting their own desktop widgets: they are now in the mainstream.

Essentially, widgets are small programs that can be placed on your website/MySpace profile/desktop that can range in functionality from simple profiles to full-blown applications. Like many things in Web 2.0, widgets are very difficult to define but they’re pretty darn cool!

What I find to be really cool about the current crop of widgets is that they are mostly HTML, CSS, and Javascript, which means that anyone with a browser and a text editor can develop their own widgets — eliminating the need for expensive archaic development suites and learning syntactically complex programming languages. This opens up the doors of desktop development to whole new army of people that were salivating to get their collective foot in the door.

Now, as soon as Microsoft and Apple get their heads out of their asses, we’ll be able to develop cross-platform widgets ;)

Where can you find more information about widgets?

If you’re running Mac OS X, click here.

If you’re running Windows Vista, click here.

[tags]widgets, sidebar, dashboard[/tags]