If you're sticking with Windows XP for now, the jealousy over Vista's Gadgets (or OS X's Widgets) can be palpable. Fear not;
dotWidget to the rescue. An open source Widget desktop for more common versions of Windows, dotWidget is a slick and feature rich project which can warm over your boring UI.
Easy to install, and with a very shallow learning curve,
dotWidgets shows some amazing potential. It doesn't completely mirror the functionality of Apple's widgets however, it makes a valiant and very eye-candy heavy attempt. Widgets can be written by anyone with light scripting knowledge (so says the developer) and are packed in zip files with a special "widgetz" extension. I've not yet dug into developing my own dotWidget but, I'm finding myself extremely tempted.
A selection of add-on Widgets are available from the dotWidgets site and, although I've found them to be hit-or-miss, there are some definite gems among the collection.
Take the jump for a few bonus detail shots of my own dotWidget setup.
My lower right corner, with configurable border-less weather and disk space monitors.
My upper right corner; Calendar, flexible search box (searches Amazon, Dictionary, Thesaurus, eBay, Google Images, etc..) and RSS viewer. The RSS Widget is drag and drop aware, simply drag your feed url on to the Widget to see the resulting feed, add the feed to favorites for quick switching between must-reads in a never-off-the-desktop style.
Tags: desktop addons, desktop candy, DesktopAddons, DesktopCandy, gadgets, opensource, widgets
