dotWidget 1.0

by admin March 22, 2006 at 9:53 am

Bring the power of desktop widgetery to your Windows 2000, XP or 2003 PC!

Through the use of simple yet powerful scripts, you can bring your desktop to life with widgets that do just about anything you can imagine. Not only that, but they look great too! Here are just some of dotWidget’s key features:

Unique ‘Gripper’ allows for easy positioning of widgets. Activating a widget displays a small icon over the widget – the ‘gripper’ – use this to move the widget around the screen as you would a normal window and right-click it to open the widget’s menu, which gives access to the widget’s generic settings and other dotWidget functionality. Don’t forget that you can still click on the widget itself to access functionality it provides!

Enhanced ‘Click Through’ feature. When a widget is set to Click Through it ignores mouse and keyboard events and instead passes them through to the window below. However, dotWidget still knows when the mouse is over a widget and displays the gripper – just like it would for a regular widget!

Powerful built-in script objects. Create and display pop-up menus, initiate asynchronous HTTP requests, grab forecasts from Weather.com?¢‚Äû¬¢, check your Google Mail?¢‚Äû¬¢ account, and query a multitude of system information – all from a few simple commands in a VB script!

Reclaim the notification tray! dotWidget doesn’t put an unnecessary icon in the system tray; instead you can access all functionality through any active widget. In addition, pressing CTRL+F9 will launch dotDashboard which pops all widgets to the foreground and and shows any hidden widgets.

No large downloads. dotWidget doesn’t rely on large additional downloads, such as the .net framework. XP users should find themselves up and running instantly; Windows 2000 users may need to download the Microsoft GDI+ library (about 1 MB in size).

Easy on resources. Even in this day of home PCs with 512 MB and more of memory, dotWidget is very light on both RAM and CPU resources – using on average 2 MB for the base core, then around 1 MB per widget loaded. CPU utilization under normal use is similarly light – around the 1% mark

Download: dotWidget 1.0 | Screenshots