Widgets - tools and toys

Within 24 hours of installing the Yahoo Widget Engine, I was completely addicted to Yahoo!’s Day Planner widget (which comes with the engine). I’ve been struggling to find a todo list setup that’s convenient for me and this one happened to have the perfect combination.

  1. It tied to Yahoo! and I happen to use both their calendar AND task list for my personal and KWD stuff.
  2. It tied to Outlook, which my Day Job company uses for meetings (and now I use to track my tasks).

So, with a few clicks, I can manage my business and personal events, and my day and moonlighting tasks.

Beyond that, it has options for setting the widget opacity and window behavior, so I can keep the task list on top and somewhat see-through (I’m even typing behind it right now).

I anxiously check for new, useful widgets, but am disappointed to find a very low tool to toy ratio of new entries. Why aren’t people using Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator widgets) for more mash-ups? Is there a technical limitation I missed in the documentation and tutorial? I would rather see a widget that ties to Basecamp or Freshbooks than another widget to display iTunes.

Any thoughts? Am I missing something here? Why is this market untapped? Have the Mac OSX and Google versions of this already gone there?

 


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