Due to Google Desktop being incompatible with certain things that I need to run, I recently had to find an alternative. The thing I liked about it was that it kept the main things I’m interested in (mail, stock quotes, and rss feeds) on one easy sidebar. Thinking back, I remembered trying out the Yahoo Widgets after they bought Konfabulator last year, but there weren’t many useful widgets at the time. For those who don’t know, Konfabulator was basically what Dashboard on Macs was based on. It creates a simple framework that allows developers to create widgets that sit on a users desktop and do pretty much anything you can think of. Anyway, I decided to give Yahoo Widgets another shot since it looked like there were a lot more available now, and this time I decided to look at the framework a little deeper. It turns out widgets are amazingly simple to create or tweak so now I have exactly what I wanted and I’m planning on creating some other things I’m interested in. The only downside is that it’s a memory hog, chewing anywhere from 5-20 megs of memory per widget so unless you have a decent amount of RAM you probably don’t want to run this. Anyway, I think I see what all the hype about WinFX and Avalon is for and if Windows Vista doesn’t come out soon or if Apple ever fixes their threading/concurrency problems, I might have to think about getting a Mac too.