Any Widgets You Actually USE?

Prior to owning an iMac, I was never a great fan of desktop widgets. Most of them seemed useless to me, and some of the ones I tried out were memory hogs.

But, it seems to me widget technology has improved a lot in the past year. Microsoft seems to have done a pretty good job with widgets on Vista, Google Desktop has some interesting widgets. Moreover, these do not seem to drag the system down like widgets once did. But, my recent experience with widgets is on my iMac, and I am actually finding some of these widgets to be useful.

I’ll mention a couple of widgets I use, and look forward to hearing from you about ones that you find useful.

A widget that I found very helpful when preparing for upgrading my iMac to the Leopard OS was the Application Update widget:

I just click on its “refresh” area and it (1) identifies what programs are installed on my iMac and (2) goes to VersionTracker to see if there are any updates. When I ran this a couple of days ago, I was surprised that I was a few versions behind on VMware Fusion beta and that there were a few other programs of interest that had updates. So, I used the widget to download the updates, and now almost all of my programs are Leopard compatible (still a few I need to verify).

I do not know if Vista or Google Desktop has anything similar to the Application Update widget, but no doubt they have one of my other favorite widgets: the weather widget.

Of course there are others that I use, too, such as the calculator widget and one for CPU and disk-usage stats and so on.

What I really like about the iMac widgets is that they are not constantly displayed on my desktop. But, accessing them is easy” just a click of the middle mouse button and they all pop up.

I have not really gone out and sought any other widgets, but am very much interested in hearing about which ones you find useful, if any. I”m also interested in hearing what you think of widgets in general.