Of late, and in anticipation of Vista, no doubt, I’ve been hearing a lot of vendors talk about widgets. SAP even demo’ed a couple in the SAP TechEd keynote.
As an Apple-dude, I’ve used widgets for awhile now. At the moment, I use the clock widgets to keep track of the different time zones I care about (PST, MT, CST, and BST), the Feedburner stats widget, an HTML character widget, and the weather widget for Austin.
I’ve played around with others, but those are the ones I’ve had running the whole time. Along those, lines I wouldn’t say I’m a heavy widget user. To be frank, having to switch between two different modes kind of ruins it for me. While it’s fine when I want to check something — hit F12, read the weather for a couple seconds, hit F12 and get back to work — I don’t really see widgets as anything other than read only. Really, if I’m going to be interacting with something, I’d rather have a “normal” application.
All that said, I’m getting the sense that several people are looking at widgets as front-ends into their larger applications.
What do you, dear readers, think?
Tags: widgets
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