With TIME magazine declaring YOU as their person of the year Newsweek decided to join in on the fun and proclaim that 2007 would be the year of the widget. I sure hope to hell that the year ahead of us will produce something more noteworthy than explosion of more useless widgets.
Come on let’s get real here people. To think that the highest point we have to look forward to technologically is the proliferation of useless desktop hogging clocks or weather doodads is really pretty sad. Sure it’s cool to have a clock on your desktop or in your sidebar or even at a stretch a weather widget to tell you what you could see by looking out the window; but this fluff gets old really quick. I use the sidebar in Vista and after the first flush of having a new toy to play with it becomes almost invisible – definitely not useful.
If you think I’m being a little facetious here just for a minute look at what is really available in our new world of widgets courtesy of our current providers of this technological wonderment.
- 400 Date and Time Widgets
- 805 News Feed Widgets
- 252 Cam Viewers
- 94 Geek Stuff – of which they include a Dice Roller – oh wow … it’s that just incredible.
Windows Live Gallery – Sidebar Widgets
- 10 Mail and contacts
- 39 News and Feeds
- 128 Tools and Utilities – which included <gasp> are you ready … a Clock .. wowzers
- 17 Techy, geeky, cool – and yes incredibly it has two .. count ‘em two Windows Vista Countdown doodads
Yup I can see that these darn widgets are going to do so much to improve our computing lives it’s incredible. I can hardly wait.
What a waste.
