For a year, I was REALLY into making widgets. I’d would still be making them if they ever fixed the bugs I reported and got the performance of the widget engine better.
My self-hosted homepage for my widgets was here, while my approved widgets are hosted on the official site. There is one secret widget I made that isn’t really hosted anywhere, and that’s my cockroach simulator. That was one of my favorite widgets. It hogged my CPU, but it was worth it to see a cockroach scurrying around my screen. My most popular script was probably Doom mooD.
I know it’s been mentioned by Dwight Silverman twice before, and I still haven’t found anything that’s even close to the combined whimsy and functionality. When you add in the nostalgia factor, I don’t think anything can match up to it.
From programming widgets, I learned about XML and javascript. I got into some of the heavy object orientated side of javascript, and even started making libraries for other widget makers. I also started making Photoshop scripts to help automate taking my Photoshop designs into the XML layouts for the Yahoo! Widget Engine.