Say you have a widget, but it doesn’t do what you want. The great thing is, they’re only HTML and Javascript.
Take, for example, the widget at right. This is dashLicious, a great widget from protagonist.co.uk. Now, I don’t know if I’ve violated a license anywhere, but I modded my my widget because I wanted to have it persistent—always on my desktop—like an application. This means that the widget no longer knew when to grab information from Safari for posting to my del.icio.us bookmark feed. It needed a “refresh” button.
So, I added one. I made a change to the CSS, a change to the HTML, and I added three lines of Javascript. That was it. Among other things, this means that the code for dashLicious (in all three cases) was very clear and well written. Second, it means that I can now use their widget as a full time app, and replace Cocoalicious as my bookmark posting tool, as it was crashing on me something fierce.
I’m impressed. Dashboard widgets will likely be a very useful thing before all is said and done. I’m pleased.