Yahoo! Widgets Engine Editor's Review

Yahoo! Widgets Engine provides a complete widget engine that works like the native widget support that has been built in Mac OS X.

Yahoo! Widgets has its own widget system, so it can't run Mac widgets. It runs its own widgets. If you want more besides the ones that come bundled with the installation package, then you can download more from the Yahoo! Widgets Web page.

The application has a Dock menu where you can find the installed widgets. This Dock can be closed. The only thing that remains open is the Yahoo! Widgets menu and the currently running widgets.

You can use the widgets by floating around your Desktop and/or you can use them into an environment that looks like your Mac OS X Dashboard. This feature is called 'Heads Up Display'.

Yahoo! Widgets provides a complete configuration menu. It provides both global configuration and individual settings for each of your installed widgets.

The application has built in an update functionality so you won't miss any new functionality. In case you get stuck with something, a well structured 'Help' is available online.

Pluses: it gives a complete environment for a proprietary widgets engine, it's a cross-platform solution because Yahoo! Widgets is available for Windows users too.

Drawbacks / flaws: the application's Dock might be annoying sometimes when you would like to drag it around your desktop.

In conclusion: this is a very interesting implementation of a widget engine. It is powerful enough to compete with the built in widget engine. Even though Yahoo! Widget itself and its widgets use more system resources than Dashboard's widgets, the amount of resources is comparable.

version reviewed: 4.0