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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>, an HTML character widget<\/a>, and the weather widget for Austin.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n All that said, I’m getting the sense that several people are looking at widgets as front-ends into their larger applications.<\/p>\n What do you, dear readers, think?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n