Yahoo! Widget Engine

WATCH OUT!!! Some irresponsible individual on the developer's staff made the default preference to start Yahoo Widgets on restart or log in. Turn it off in Yahoo Widget preferences.

I used YahooWidget for years with satisfaction on Yosemite. Unfortunately you did not deign to make her(it) compatible on High Sierra and I thus got rid of it. I have of to look for substitution applications for some widgets but there is nothing for Dashbord. What a pity!!!

I'll say that this is definitely one durable set of widgets! Amazingly, the Mac version (I started with this back when Arlo Rose developed it as Konfabulator, before Yahoo bought them up) is still working under Mac OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), and from a quick initial try under OS X El Capitan (10.11), it looked like it's still working there, as well(!). Now, maybe if I learn Javascript, I could develop some new widgets for this... ;-) Oh, I did turn off the check-for-update part (I forgot if that's in the Widget engine on the menubar, or within individual widgets), since IIRC, that was giving some error message a while back.

Confabulator/Yahoo Widget Engine lives on in "Connected TV", as of this post, Sony, Samsung, VIZIO, Toshiba, & Hisense HDTVs use it: http://developer.yahoo.com/connectedtv/

Yahoo widgets was infinitely better than OSx widgets, but many widgets for mac have gone by the wayside, perhaps the whole app things has destroyed the idea of widgets and many Geeklets give a better use. However it always wins out over mac osx widgets in that you can show them all on the desktop and they are often more controllable. Amnesty helps with displaying osx widgets but it is a bit creaky these days, and i started to use some of these yahoo widegets again and had forgotten how good they were.

WATCH OUT!!! Some irresponsible individual on the developer's staff made the default preference to start Yahoo Widgets on restart or log in. Turn it off in Yahoo Widget preferences.

My favorite Yahoo Widget was the Daily Planner, which would show you what's in iCal for today and tomorrow. But it hasn't worked since Leopard. (The Dashboard widget iCal Events can be moved to the desktop, but dashboard widgets always float above everything and won't go into the background.) Yahoo support has been stalling for three months. Today they suggested updating the Widget Engine to version 4.5.2, which, unfortunately, doesn't exist.

Is a version planned for OS X 10.5?

The last few updates seem to have fixed most of the major problems I mentioned in my review of version 4.0. YWE will periodically crash (widgets are still running, but the menu item + dock are gone), but I haven't experienced contextual menu or problems with Yahoo's own widgets crashing in awhile. The design quibbles with 4.x that I described previously are still there, though. I don't expect them to change in a minor point release, so hopefully version 5.x will address some of those.

I find it telling that neither MacUpdate nor VersionTracker has a review that goes beyond version 4.0.3. It sounds like abandonware on the part of the users. It also sounds as if the Yahoo folks haven't listened to a word of feedback about their product; none of the updates appears to address any of the issues I've seen cited here. I for one will not use this program, although Version 3 was very nice.