Yahoo! Widgets are small, specific applications that you can run on your Windows or Mac OS desktop. A Widget can do almost anything from displaying a weather forecast to playing a game. Widgets generally sit on your desktop and don"t look like applications as we"re used to seeing them in a standard window. Instead, Widgets tend to look like small pictures or animations. Yahoo! Widgets help you save time and stay current by bringing an always-updated, at-a-glance view of your favorite Internet services right to your desktop. The Yahoo! Widget Gallery offers over 4,000 desktop Widgets - the most available anywhere online. Yahoo! Widgets is the only major desktop Widgets platform that works on both Windows and Mac OSes.
Changes in Version 4.0
Performance
* Implemented image sharing to attempt to reduce memory consumption for some Widgets.
* When a Window is hidden, we now release all the drawing buffers. Not a huge savings in most cases, but hey.
* XPath is now substantially faster on large XML DOMs.
* We now load Win HTTP on-demand.
* Rewrote COM support to be faster and fixed some issues with event sinks.
Animations
* Implemented Resize Animation.
* It is now possible to reuse an animation. Previously, once an animation was complete, it was useless.
* Changed animations to always call any "done" function you pass in even if the animation is run with runUntilDone (i.e. synchronously). This only takes effect if your minimumVersion is 4.0 or later.
Filesystem
* Added filesystem.zip() and filesystem.unzip() as simple utilities to do basic zip/unzip actions.
* Filesystem.move() now will rename a file (i.e. it should now behave exactly like the unix mv command).
* Added filesystem.getMD5() to return the MD5 string for a given file.
* Added optional third parameter to filesystem.writeFile. You can now pass a boolean to tell us whether or not to append to the file instead of merely overwriting the entire file. appendFile( path, content [, append] );
* Added filesystem.createDirectory() and filesystem.remove(). view full changelog
Operating Systems Supported
* Windows XP SP2, 2000 SP4
* Windows Vista
* Mac OS X 10.3.9 and up