Yahoo Widget Engine / Konfabulator
Installed Yahoo! Widget Engine tonight. After a lot of wrangling I got it working.
Suffice to say that the Yahoo default of installing the “My Widgets” folder under My Documents causes a lot of problems for anyone who has their My Documents folder synchronized, which might be many corporate users. Or maybe it was just my experience. I got a range of errors from “Visual C++ runtime error” to “Invalid parameter”.
But, I figured it out and moved on with the help of the Forums.
I have a couple of these doo-dads installed. WifiSignal/miniBattery/miniCalendar/miniWeather. I looked through a bunch more and nothing jumped out and grabbed me. I looked through a couple threads on favorites but didn’t see any that jumped out at me either. I just installed Blogliner as well.
The list of all Yahoo! Widgets is here. The big thing I noticed that was missing on this page is a way to find “Top Rated” and “Popular” widgets, kind of like Firefox does with its Extensions directory.
The primary navigation for the Yahoo! Widget directory is either search or time-based. Time-based is next to useless. Search is good, but when you are starting out you are looking for the killer apps. It would be nice if Yahoo! helped me find the “killer widgets” first rather than having to hunt around for them.
Just this user’s perspective. Anyone use the Widget Engine and have favorites to share? I will probably uninstall it in a month if I don’t find anything that compelling. My problem is that a lot of my cool widgets are already Firefox extensions.
January 2nd, 2006 at 2:38 pm
We are working on changes to the gallery that will give you all the features you’re asking for plus a whole bunch more — coming soon.
January 5th, 2006 at 8:48 am
What are some of your favorite widgets?
January 29th, 2006 at 9:44 am
Despite my best efforts I continue to get runtime errors when launching the engine. I saw where one person on a forum had some luck removing a Java runtime package. I did the same, rebooted and still get the runtime error. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Oh, and I’m definitely one of those many people out there who synch everything in My Documents. Could that really be the root of this?…
January 29th, 2006 at 9:52 am
Yes. If you have a “My Widgets” folder, move it onto a local drive rather than a share which is sync’d. That fixed all of my runtime errors.
For example, My Widgets was created under My Documents by Yahoo Widget Engine. I moved My Widgets off under the C: drive directly.
Try it out.
January 29th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Holy cow! I can’t believe the solution was that simple. I sent a message to Yahoo’s support and never heard a peep back. All I had to do was move the folder like you suggested and now I’m back in business. Thanks!