The widgetsphere is roughly divided into two camps. There are desktop widgets like Apple Dashboard Widgets, Windows Gadgets, and Yahoo Widgets that act as standalone mini-apps that pull in data from the Web. And there are Web widgets like Google Gadgets or countless others that act as standalone mini-apps that you can add to Web pages such as iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc. Amnesty Hypercube, an application from Mesa Dynamics that launched today in beta, is trying to bridge those two camps.
For those who prefer the clutter of desktop widgets, Hypercube converts Web widgets into desktop widgets. It also converts desktop widgets back into Web widgets so that you can put your favorite widget into Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, or Orkut. This lets you mix and match widgets from different sources through a single management console. I tried it and launched a Google News gadget, a widget that shows top Diggs, and some games.
If you are widget crazy, and your current desktop widget platform does not support the widgets you want, this could be helpful. You can take your favorite Web widget and turn it into a desktop widget. Although, most of the major widget platforms already have a wide and overlapping choice of widgets. And some, like Google Gadgets, support both desktop and Web widgets.
The free software download works only fro Mac OS X now, but a Windows version is coming in August.
Fro sho.
Will be interested in checking this little thing out once the beta version is released for Windows! Cool stuff.
Well this is sweet I love my widgets and any thing that helps my dashboard look cool is a okay with me.
Also seems to be a cool tool for widget providers. With this they potentially have to write it only for one platform and with this tool they can convert / adapt them to all the others. We’ll try it out.
IFocus is a software that clips any content you might want into your desktop (not only widgets)
http://www.getifocus.com/
There are many of these kind of services/software. There is also another nice software called amnestywidgets.com which, if I am not mistaken, is the first web widget convertor of this kind.
webmaster of http://www.webtlk.com
Then there are mobile widgets that work on any mobile device with a web browser
http://mojipage.com/
How is this better than (or different from) Netvibes Universal Widget API?
http://dev.netvibes.com/
@V - Amnesty Hypercube is a desktop app, whereas Netvibes is a webtop. I believe Hypercube also has the ability to bring your Netvibes widgets into it so you can have them as “native” widgets on your desktop.
Google Desktop already takes iGoogle widgets and make them OSX Dashboard widgets, and OSX Leopard offers a way to do this automatically as well.
Neat idea, I guess the big question here is how well it converts more complex gadgets/widgets to work on the desktop or web and vice versa. It is a pretty sweet deal for anyone building simple widgets though.
@Ummm - Google Desktop only works on iGoogle gadgets, not every other web widget out there and Leopard only “clips” live web pages — this runs web widgets directly from your local machine
Gone and obviously forgotten
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....e-desktop/
Frank & Duncan, AmnestyWidgets is a division of Mesa Dynamics — we’re one and the same. Duncan, the beta version of Hypercube is simply a completely revamped version of our original product which you wrote up — we’re still here, and so is our technology.
Sorry for the confusion…
Amnesty Generator has been around for a while, this looks handy either way. I use it to embed my private Google Calendar feed in an iframed widget on my dashboard.