Introduction
The Widgets are tiny little application which runs on your desktop and can do vast variety of tasks without even opening a browser
Yahoo! Widgets 4.5 is now supported in the following Operating Systems
- Windows XP SP2, 2000 SP4
- Windows Vista
- Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above
Product tour for the Yahoo! Widgets 4.5 is available at the following location:
Yahoo! Widget 4.5 Product Tour
New Features
The most prominient feature of Yahoo! Widget 4.x was Widget Doc, which helps in keeping all the widgets organized over the desktop. Widget Doc is a place holder for keeping all of your widgets over one place and it can be placed over any corner of your desktop, even across multiple monitors. Widget Doc can also be used to display vital updates when a particular widget is running in hiden mode.
Top ten new enhancements in this release of Yahoo! Widgets includes
- Performance improvements
- Less memory consumption
- Mini widget concept
- Gallery Widget - A widget to browse and download new widgets from the Yahoo! widget gallery from the desktop itself.
- Widget Doc - a new way to keep your desktop uncluttered.
- Improved Security concept
- HTML Support
- Adobe Flash Support
- AJAX Support
- Video Support
I was able to install the Yahoo! Widgets 4.5 in just less than 5 minute. And all my previous widgets ran.
Local & Remote HTML Support
Now Yahoo! Widgets can be built using HTML.
HTML objects can now be integrated with the Widgets and the contents of these HTML object can be manipulated dynamically. Local HTML, HTML which is bundled with the widget can also access Yahoo! Widget functionality via JavaScript from within an HTML component. Standard Widget effects like rotation, transparency can now be also applied to HTML objects as well.
Although remote HTML, HTML Fetched from Internet is als supported but it can only be executed in a sandbox kind of environment for security reasons.
AJAX Support
Yahoo! Widget Engine now embeddeds WebKit, an open-source engine which is also the core of Apple's Safari browser. This allows a developer to create the entire Widget User Interface using HTML or Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).
Multimedia Content Support
Yahoo! Widget now includes Adobe Flash 9. Yahoo Widget UI can now be also built in Flash. The Flash objects allows developers to load Flash content into their Widgets. The Flash object exposes all methods that are normally available to Flash developers (Play, Stop, Back, Forward, Rewind, etc.). As with HTML objects, Flash objects can be combined with other Yahoo! Widget objects, rotated, etc.
As with Remote HTML objects , the integration between Flash and Yahoo! Widget is only unidirectional, it is not possible to call Yahoo! Widget APIs from within Flash.
Yahoo! Widgets can now also play multimedia contents on the desktop as they can now embed videos as well.
Yahoo! Widget 4.5 now includes an enhanced security block concept.
Enhanced Security Concept
Yahoo! Widgets version 4.5 allows developers to specify Widget operations, such as file system access or Internet access, in fine-grained detail. This information is displayed to the end-user in a redesigned security dialog when the Widget runs for the first time. If the Widget tries to perform a potentially malicious operation that was not declared in the security block, Yahoo! Widget Engine stops the execution of the widget. If the security block is not present, the user is notified that full rights are being granted to the Widget -- this allows legacy Widgets, which were created without a security block, to run.
Standard Compliant
Yahoo! Widget version 4.5 is now more standard compliant as it now implements a W3C-compliant Document Object Model (DOM). This also provides DOM elements to be tightly integrated with their JavaScript capabilities.
