![]() ![]() Here’s a screenshot how gadgets look like on my desktop: ![]() In Windows 7 you can put your gadgets wherever you want them to be. The gadgets concept was introduced In Windows Vista – but gadgets had to be positioned inside a special sidebar area – which is not very flexible. IE8 core is used to run them, so you get full support for CSS2.1, great level of javascript and other IE8 goodness. If you double-click on this archive, gadget will get installed and can be moved to any place of your desktop. Both technologies combined both to create Microsoft Desktop Gadgets - small standalone client-side web applications that run as dockable widgets on your desktop – pure HTML,CSS and JS packed with manifest file in an archive. So Microsoft had two nice technologies that weren’t actively used – Active Desktop as a way to integrate web-application with desktop and HTA as a core for writing standalone client-side web applications. While any web-development IDEs could be used, there even was a special IDE for building HTAs – HTAEDIT. If you were using classic ASP on the server, you could switch to writing HTAs with zero effort – language and all the objects would be the same. – basically everything that was supported in WSH and Script Runtime. You could access all ActiveX objects that your system provided – Scripting FileSystemObject, UserAccounts, WMI etc. You had to put your scripts (VBScript or JScript) and styles in a single HTML file, add a special description and rename the file extension to. As with many other Microsoft inventions, it was way too ahead of time.Īnother technology that played a role in inventing desktop gadgets is HTA – short HTML applications that run in a standalone way. So web-widgets-like functionality was around almost twelve years ago. Microsoft even had a gallery of Active Desktop widgets. You could set an HTML page (plus JS, of course) as your desktop background and it would be run in IE. The approach of putting web-application right on a desktop was invented by Microsoft in 1994-95 (in Windows Nashville which was intended to be released in 1996) and was a part of Windows Desktop Update for Windows 95 and a core of Windows 98 Active Desktop. I’ve been playing with Windows 7 Desktop Gadget technology and I must tell you – I just love it! And I’ll tell you why :) History
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