Desktop Widgets
Desktop widgets (commonly just called widgets) are interactive virtual tools that provide single-purpose services such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather, the time, a calendar, a dictionary, a map program, a calculator, desktop notes, photo viewers, or even a language translator, among other things. Examples of widget engines include:
- Dashboard widgets of Apple Macintosh
- Microsoft gadgets in Windows Vista, Windows 7, and in the Windows Live system
- Plasmoids are widgets in Plasma, the workspace for the KDE desktop environment.
- Portlets in Google Desktop
- Yahoo! Widgets
- gdesklets, adesklets, and Screenlets in Linux
- Opera Widgets on all platforms (desktop, mobile TVs, gaming consoles) using the Opera browser's rendering engine.
- Homescreen widgets in Maemo
- Homescreen widgets in Android
Originally, desk accessories were developed to provide a small degree of multitasking, but when real multitasking OSes became available, these were replaced by normal applications.
Read more about this topic: Software Widget, Types