Widget Maker

Widget Maker is a small app designed for the Yahoo! Widget Engine, which allows you to create your own widgets by using JavaScript code and XML scripts.

The GUI of the widget is clean and pretty intuitive. Its frame can be moved to any position on the screen, with the help of the mouse cursor.

You can get started by defining the widget when it comes to the version, minimum version, whether the XML should be strictly checked or not, debug mode, tracking attribute (opacity or rectangle) and required platform (Windows, Macintosh, or both). Plus, you can allow custom object attributes and arbitrary XML, as well as set the window position to be retained.

You can create an About box by specifying an image, text and URL, as well as by altering settings when it comes to the font name, size, style, offset, color and shadow.

It is possible to define images through an ID, name, size, alignment, offset, opacity, style, visibility, tooltip, window and menu items. Text and text areas may be inserted with the same setting fields as the ones in the About box. The widget may be scheduled to trigger an event on a user-defined action (e.g. gain focus, unload, wake up the computer from sleep mode), while hotkeys and preferences can be configured (e.g. checkbox, color, font, hotkey, popup).

The feature-packed widget puts little strain on the computer's resources, since it requires a low quantity of CPU and system memory. It has a good response time to key strokes and mouse events, and includes user documentation. We have not come across any problems throughout our testing; Widget Maker did not hang, crash or display error notifications. Although it is neatly wrapped up, Widget Maker primarily addresses users with skills in JavaScript.