Yahoo! Widgets
In 2005, Yahoo! purchased Pixoria, the inventor of the modern widget, and now, less than two years later, the Yahoo! Widgets platform boasts nearly 4,000 of these nifty miniapplications. When you install the free platform (widgets.yahoo.com), Yahoo! automatically loads a handful of useful tools, including a photo viewer, a battery gauge, and a brand-new widget that streams songs from iTunes. But if you dig into the Yahoo! Widget Gallery (widgets.yahoo.com/gallery), you'll find all sorts of other gems.

We particularly like Remote Desktop, which gives you quick access to—you guessed it!—remote desktops, and PingPC, a way of instantly checking whether a machine is online or off. Yes, PingPC's lone dialog is in Italian. But you'll figure it out. If you're the programmer type, we can also recommend Code Converter, which instantly converts C# code to Visual Basic—and vice versa. Whatever type you are, don't miss Stormy Weather!, which serves up live Doppler radar images straight from the National Weather Service, or Reuters Reload, which gives you video feeds from eight different Reuters news channels. — next: Google Desktop Gadgets