Yahoo! Widgets 4
I officially have Yahoo! Widgets 4, being that it was released today as I said it would be in Yahoo Widget Engine, Formerly Known As Konfabulator. Upgrading from the previous version was very easy and all my widgets work. Of course I had to set them up again, but that wasn’t difficult.
There is one new feature that is noticeable right away. The dock shows up automatically on the right side of the screen showing all of the available widgets. This dock can be collapsed to only show the currently running widgets as well. If you don’t like the dock taking up a little bit of space, set it to automatically hide and just move your mouse over it to see it again. Otherwise, I guess you can disable the dock if you don’t like it at all.
A second new feature (my favorite) is a widget that lets you browse the widget gallery without opening a browser. If you have the dock open, you will also be notified of new widgets that are available! Good job Yahoo!
Click on the preview on the right to view the widgets that are currently on my desktop, along with the dock showing.
Widgets running: Desk Calendar, Live Search Mini, Neon Gauges, Neon Clock and Yahoo! Weather (which is included with YW 4).
There is also a video tour of Yahoo! Widgets 4 running that is available if you’re curious, but not sure about installing yet.
Overall, I’m impressed with this new release. I think the dock showing the currently active widgets is a very nice idea. YW 4 gets a rating of 4.5 stars from me. If they would come up with a catchier name, I would give them 5 stars!
UPDATE: Because of a comment made by Jonathan Strauss (product manager for Yahoo!) (see below), I am changing the rating from 4.5 stars to 5 stars!
4 Responses to “Yahoo! Widgets 4”
Leave a Reply
Jonathan Strauss on March 22nd, 2007
Hiya. I’m a product manager for Yahoo! Widgets. We’re very happy that all of our hard work is being appreciated. I just wanted to let you know that, while the consumer product is still called Yahoo! Widgets, we have (re)renamed the developer platform back to Konfabulator. You can read more about that here and here.
Enjoy! :-D
alisha on March 23rd, 2007
That is great! Now we can all refer to it as Konfabulator or Yahoo! Widgets and be correct. Thanks for stopping by!
Groovy Lady on March 25th, 2007
Sounds like a cool product! Thanks for telling us about it Alisha.. I’m going to check it out.
LOL.. old habits die hard don’t they? I remember making you give me a list of all of your FF extensions and getting all the same ones. Seems I’m copying you yet again. :P
alisha on March 26th, 2007
Haha, that’s okay! You’ll love it! (I hope)