I’ve been working on an article about widgets and gadgets and I forgot how much fun they are to look through and play with. I have the Windows Sidebar on my Vista computer, but hadn’t really taken the time to customize it until now. There are quite a few good gadgets available for the Vista Sidebar.

I also downloaded the most current version of Yahoo! gadgets on one of my XP machines and was pleasantly surprised to find that they had improved the program quite a bit since I looked at it a few years ago when it was owned by Konfabulator. Now they have over 4,000 widgets to choose from.

For those of you who might not be familiar with gadgets and widgets, these are tiny little programs that reside on your desktop and are constantly updated. Microsoft calls them gadgets and everyone else calls them widgets. They have long been a part of Mac OS X, as well.They are perfect for clocks, to do lists, stock tickers, sports scores, and weather programs. I was surprised to see that there are so many to choose from now, and also amazed by the usability of some of them. You can get everything from the status of the London underground Tube to live views of traffic in many different areas.

I’ll keep on playing and let you know which are my favorites.