So I’m going to do a little intro for all the different types of Widgets / Gadgets that are out there currently for Windows and Hopefully Mac OS X, and if lucky maybe even some of the Linux KDE and Gnome Widgets.
My first introduction is the Google Home Page Gadgets. Currently if you go to Google.com and select personalized home, you can customize your home page on Google.com to reflect what you want to see. For example you can add in the current weather, slashdot.org rss feeds, news feeds from around the globe, the scores from your favorite football team and a manner of other useful information.
Here is a sample screenshot of a Google.com personalized home page.
As you can see from the screenshot above there a few things that can be added to the Google home page. There is always something new being added to the repository, which can be accessed by the link in the top left hand corner. You can also write your own widget and publish it to be accessible from the Google widget repository. The documentation for developers is very concise and helpful, there is also a discussion group available to discuss with other developers any issues you might have. I myself have written a Google widget which was a fun experience and provided me with some good insight on how to build more widgets in the future.
I would certainly recommend using the Google home page as a portal because it provides a wealth of content is pretty fast considering the dynamic content being pulled in, and its very easy to rearrange the windows, its just a matter of drag and drop and you can rearrange the whole page to your liking.
I plan to revisit the Google Home page in a later article when I’ll go into some of the details of developing widgets as well as reviewing some of the more popular and useful widgets that are currently available.
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I’ve been a die-hard Google guy for years, but only recently started using the Gogle personalized home page!