XWidget

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on December 20, 2011

There's hardly a desktop enhancement we haven't seen, tried, or uninstalled over the years. Many have potential but simply don't pass the daily use test; others have quirks or bugs. Many simply clutter up the desktop. XWidget is a free desktop widget application that has a little of "all of the above." The widgets it creates are small and attractive, mostly, but odd translations and some clunky behavior place it in the "not ready for prime time" category.

For starts, XWidget places a fat Dashboard at the bottom of your desktop, with three open widgets: time, weather, and pictures. The Dashboard lists all the available widgets, all but one an "Eker-something": EkerTime, EkerSystem, Eker Uptime, EkerRSS, and so on. When the Dashboard is open or widgets are active, the desktop is dimmed, an effect we didn't like, though we could adjust the opacity from none to total blackness via a slider on the Options sheet. Clicking the desktop closed the Dashboard and widgets, which was a bit annoying when we had to keep returning to the program's System Tray menu. We also noticed some poor translations: "EkerWeahter," for instance, or the "earch Widge" button. However, you can edit many of each widget's properties via the bundled XWidget Designer, which can also create new widgets.

XWidget's default widgets worked well enough, once we'd set our location. The weather widget quickly accessed our local time and conditions, once we'd chosen the correct location from a drop-down list. The EkerUptime widget includes Restart and Shut Down buttons. The widgets are compact and have a matte-black finish that goes well with media players and other typical desktop residents. XWidget could use some polish, both in translations as well as functionality. Some proofreading, for example, might have avoided some confusion among English-speaking users. As a free tool for creating and managing desktop widgets, though, it has potential, and it's well worth a look.

 

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Publisher's Description

From XWidget Software Studio:

XWidget is a free desktop customization platform. It's light, handy with powerful visual widget editor and very subtle animations. More fast startup speed, low resources taken, with smooth animation effect.

What's new in this version: Version 1.4 includes the following enhancements:

• Add Custom Hotkey option
• Add AccuWeatherCore "SwitchTempUnit" action to swtich temp unit C/F
• Add AccuWeatherCore City Search History list
• Add script function "isKeyDown()"
• Add WeatherCore will Auto Load last weather information before update
• Add RightClick Popup Menuitem "Lock/UnLock All Widget", "MouseThrough All Widget"
• Add Widget OnMsg Event and Function widget.msg("") to send m... See all new features

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