Web Worker Daily

Widgets, mini applications that usually sit on your desktop for on-the-fly tasks, are all the rage among Mac users, but I’m constantly surprised that more Windows users don’t use them. If you’re a Windows-based web worker, you can quickly download a bunch of really useful examples from Microsoft’s Windows Live Gallery–for free. Like Google, Microsoft calls them gadgets, so at the Windows Live Gallery page you want to click on Web Gadgets to see what’s available. There are also many good examples at Google Desktop Gadgets.

In this post, I’ll round up several of the gadgets and widgets I’ve found most useful. You can download any of these in seconds, search for them by name, and there are user ratings for the ones at the Live Gallery site.

At Google’s site, Battery Life is a great little desktop tool for finding out how much juice you’ve got left after a few hours of laptop use. The Package Tracking gadget is also handy. I also like the Web News gadget as an alternative to scanning RSS feeds. Many other useful iGoogle gadgets, for customizing your iGoogle page, were collected in a post on this blog this week.

On the Microsoft Live Gallery site, Clipboard History is a great little gadget for looking at items you put in your clipboard that are no longer there. There are also quite a lot of good gadgets for checking system and battery status. A whole series of MultiMeter gadgets, for example, monitor multi-core processors and memory for usage levels.

Windows users looking to hop on the widget bandwagon should also look at some of the tools available at Yahoo! Widget Gallery. Yahoo!’s collection of useful widgets is particularly large, because it acquired Konfabulator–one of the pioneering companies in the widget space.

Yahoo! automatically provides you with a set of sample widgets when you choose to go with its widgets. In their gallery, definitely try the Remote Desktop widget, which is one of the absolute easiest ways to remotely control a faraway computer. It could save you if you arrive at a hotel and realize you left an important presentation behind. Shortcut Dock is also a very nice little tool for collecting all of your Windows Shortcuts. And PubMatic Heads Up is a slick little tool if you happen to generate any revenues from Google AdSense. It lets you see a running tally of what kind of money you’re making.

Finally, if you are a regular user of WordPress, did you know that there is a large collection of good widgets for use specifically with it? Also check out Widgipedia, for encyclopedic coverage of widgets as well as a large set of good tutorials on widgets, and Opera Widgets for widgets you can use with the Opera browser.

Do you have any good widget tips?