Yahoo Widget Engine: Day 2
I find myself liking these little widgets more than I expected to, and also for different reasons than I expected.
For one, I like the fact that they are unobtrusive. A laptop is my primary computer and screen real estate is somewhat of a premium to me. I enjoy that the widgets don’t appear until I hit the familiar F8 key which then brings up the widgets.
Still looking for killer widgets, but for now it’s enough that the software isn’t annoying. So much other software suffers from the somewhat useful, but annoying fate. This, at least, is somewhat useful and not annoying.
Annoying software lasts only a few days on my machine. Non-annoying software earns the right to stay on a couple more weeks to try it out more.
January 2nd, 2006 at 2:35 pm
So when will Channel Advisor start writing selling management widgets?
January 4th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
I’m a fan of widgets too, although I do find a few things about them annoying. Last couple are from more of a developer perspective. 1 - memory footprint - the RAM requirements for a single widget seem incredibly out of whack with the functionality they provide. Luckily, RAM is cheap and I have enough of it. 2 - Outlook widget - this widget seems to slow down Outlook itself, presumably because it is updating and my remote connection to Exchange is very slow. 3 - animation CPU hogging - it may be a JS issue, but animated graphics seem to take way more CPU grunt than they should need. 4 - standard libraries - I know a key benefit of JS is the wealth of reusable code out there, but a few more core libraries shipped with the engine that deal with XML parsing/creation, and request error handling would reduce the weight of a lot of individual widgets.
January 6th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
I would love to have a little widget in there, Jeff. Roadmaps, roadmaps…