Dave Kellam

Microsoft has introduced Gadgets, their forray into the world of desktop widgets. I’m not claiming that Apple has the most original thing in the world going with the Dashboard (see Konfabulator) but at least they both call them widgets. For some reason, Microsoft has chosen a name that is 70% similar but not quite the same.

I’ll give them the sidebar, I saw it demoed for my HCI class years ago and thought it was pretty cool. But they ditched it part way through Longhorn. This is called putting widgets into the OS and dressing them up with research that they’ve already done.

Also, start.com is kind of weird. Microsoft has added this statement at the bottom for clarity:

This site is not an officially supported site. it is an incubation experiment and doesn’t represent any particular strategy or policy.

An incubation experiment! Pod people! Yea. There’s also an Office 12 demo video, it’s over 400mb for the cautious.

I decided to buy Mint for eightface in the wee hours of the morning last night. It’s been out for awhile now, so I’m sure the post title is clever and original. For those living under rocks or those who don’t care about websites, it’s essentially a statistics package that allows you to see who is visiting your site.

Dreamhost includes Analog on all hosted domains, so it’s easy enough to get a rough daily statistics breakdown. It might not be enough, depends what your needs are though — the scope of analog is fairly broad and it’s a little on the cryptic side but it suits most people fine. If you’re one of the new-age blog freaks that lives on the 0-day edge and lusts after technorati and the like, Mint is right up your alley.

Like most web-apps these days, Mint is extensible with a plugin and api structure. If you offer up any files on your site, it’s probably worth getting the Pepper plugin download counter, which does pretty much what it says. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, check out the Pepper forum for more.