The Yahoo! Widget Engine (formerly known as Konfabulator) is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.

What sets Yahoo! Widget Engine apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of today's advanced graphics. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home in Windows XP and Mac OS X.

The format for these Widgets is completely open and easy to learn so creating your own Widgets is an extremely easy task.

For the "skinning" crowd, Yahoo! Widget Engine is a dream come true. You can easily change the look, feel, layout, even functionality of a Widget so that it matches your lifestyle, your desktop, or the pants or skirt you have on that day.

Waht's New:

4.5.2

· Fixes:
· Implemented text speedup for Mac.
· Fixed event.key
· Added support for numlock modifier on keyboard, mouse, and drag events
· map the window levels correctly (mac only)
· Added timeout property to XHR.
· Added JSON object (from json.org).
· Leopard support
· Fix issue with unlocalized "Preferences" submenu in system tray.
· Allow CSS to affect text alignment even in non-wrapped text objects. Only works with a minimum version of 4.5 or later.
· Fix issue where saveImageToFile() couldn't deal with scrolled frames.
· Fix localization of preferences dialog title.
· Fix localization of dialog title when iTunes is not installed.
· FINALLY support ctrl-a and ctrl-e in the evaluation field in the debug window on Windows.
· Always set system.event when minVersion >= 4.5. system.event is, however, considered deprecated. You should always use the event passed to your handlers.
· Implement URL properties to expose a URL 'cracking' API, i.e. you can access the components of a URL.
· Get Drag/Drop working for window objects (Windows only?)
· Allow 0 as a valid length value in CSS. It's supposed to be valid.
· Only print warnings about elements being in widget and metadata files if the values actually differ
· Changed XPath to work to spec. It wasn't returning the correct result for string() functions.
· Added window.getCurrentMousePosition()
· Added window.close()
· Added widget.createWindowFromXML()
· Lazier GC on minimum version or 4.5 or greater.
· Added onPreferencesCancelled.
· We now properly propagate exceptions thrown in the ready state callback of an XMLHttpRequest through to the open or send call that may have called it.
· Fixed issues with text files getting double linefeeds.
· Made sure the main window doesn't get shown if hidden and form() is called.
· Fixed issue where we couldn't parse XML with DOCTYPE, particularly for vitality.
· Added Display object and various functions to allow you to get the display list.
· Added Rectangle object to allow you to do fun things like union and intersection. Wahooo!!!
· Fixed various canvas drawing issues.
· Now allow canvas to render another canvas via drawImage.
· Ubiquitous mouse handlers.
· No more crashing when calling removeChild on context menu items.
· No more crashing when passing an anonymous function to URL.fetchAsync().
·
· Known Issues:
· On Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), a call to Flash's IsPlaying() method always returns false ' even if the Flash object is, in fact, playing.
· Flash's readystate reporting cycles through all five states, even if the Flash movie does not exist.
· Flash quality method is not returning proper information.
· HTML is not supported on Windows 2000 or Mac OS 10.3.9
· No IME support for Flash or HTML