Widgets & Desktop Objects.  They are terms that have become increasingly popular over the past couple of years.  What are they? Why do we need them? Why now?

Widgets & Desktop Objects can be used interchangeably. They all have to do with one thing making the desktop home to more than static images (called "icons").  Since Apple released the Lisa back in 1983sh, the computer desktop has increasingly moved towards a visual interface. The GUI (or gooey).  The little images on your computer screen represented programs and data.  But for the most part, they were just static images of a fixed size (except on the Amiga where each icon could be of different size).

Desktop objects and widgets take the icon concept to the next logical step.  Desktop objects became popularized by DesktopX. These objects were live. They could be independently sized, they could react to system messages. The simplest desktop objects were treated like icons. They represented programs or data. But they were independently sized and would grow or zoom or spin when the mouse was over them.

The objects in this screenshot are typical. They were essentially glorified icons but they animated when the mouse was over them and their size was independently of the system icon size restraints (i.e. they didn't have to be 32x32 pixels).

Over time, these objects became increasingly complex and powerful. At some point, many of these objects were essentially mini-programs in themselves. This mini-programs started supplanting stand alone programs that performed these same uses.  Email checkers, analog clocks, digital clocks, MP3 players, CPU meters, etc. Long ago there used to be entire skin libraries dedicated to programs that were simply digital clocks that could be skinned. These enhanced objects, because of their lower overhead, slowly squeezed these programs near extinction (Beatnik, while far less popular than it used to be, still survives).

When Konfabulator for MacOS came out, they skipped the whole "enhanced icons" concept of desktop objects and went straight to the mini-application era.  This has more to do with timing than anything else I suspect. By 2003, computers were starting to be powerful enough to handle multiple slick looking mini programs on the desktop at once.  Konfabulator called these mini-programs "widgets" and that's the term I'll use here to describe desktop objects with significant functionality.

But that only answers, what they are. Why do we need this stuff? Why now?

The why are they so popular now part is easier to answer.  Simply put, widgets, to be compelling, must be irregularly shaped just like icons are. But until recently, having irregularly shaped things (Besides icons) on the desktop required considerable overhead.  Users who tried DesktopX 1 oh so long ago may have come away with a negative impression because of all the effort that had to be done in order to simply display something, on your desktop, irregularly shaped.

But since Windows XP has come out, the hardware and OS support for layered windows has been there so that it's much easier to have irregularly shaped things on the desktop.  Remember, even Winamp, until Winamp 5, was a square.

But that's why widgets have really become popular. Enough people can now run many irregularly shaped things on their desktops at once without it affecting their system resources/performance.

But that leaves the question: WHY use them?  I think the real question should be, why not use them. It's like asking "Why user a computer?"  It all depends on what you need to do.  Personally, I don't use weather widgets.  I don't care about what my CPU use is at a given moment.  I don't need to know my net traffic.  I really don't want to know my stock prices yet. And I know what time it is by looking at the Start bar.  So I probably sound like the last person who would recommend using widgets.

And yet, here I am recommending them because while I don't use those particular widgets I use lots of other widgets.  I have a widget that tells me how many handles are in use.  I have another widget that tells me the store status.  I have a widget that controls iTunes. I have a widget that tells me the CNN headline news.  I have a widget that lets me know the latest blogs on JoeUser. And yes, I have a couple of little pets on my desktop too.  And with DesktopX 2.2, I can hit F9 to bring these widgets to top (except for the pets who are desktop level and ignore the F9 key). 

A different person might have totally different uses for widgets.  But like I said, widgets are the next logical step for icons. What icons someone has on their desktop changes from machine to machine. Since the overhead of widgets is so low, their value-add becomes pretty compelling pretty early on. 

And so that's why I think we're seeing such an explosion of widget related software.  The hardware is there, the software is now there, there's a growing community of widget makers (it's a logical extension of skinning after all) and the software is mature enough that there's very little reason not to have a widget or two on your desktop. And unlike other programs, you can mix and match your widget enabling software.  I could mix DesktopX with Samurize or any other widget enabling program.