4 ms·

Now the struggle will be to not forget how much these sucked, so that they don't come back in slightly different guise in five years, when the wheel has turned

Now the struggle will be to not forget how much these sucked, so that they don't come back in slightly different guise in five years, when the wheel has turned and a new generation of designers starts to think it is bright idea. I wouldn't mind seeing the Desktop Gadgets from Vista and Windows 7, which were killed off in favor of Live Tiles, make a comeback.

i80and 7y ago
There was a period of UI design in the late-2000's (late 90's, if you include BeOS) where desktop gadgets caught on, and I thought that was a pretty good implementation of the general idea. Then it all vanished for some reason.
- velosol 7y ago
  The iPhone. That's a little generous, but the rise of smartphones (and their data connections) brought widgets and gadgets to the handheld, with-you-everywhere device and a little advertising on top didn't hurt. The motivated persons who developed the gadgets for free or donation moved to apps because it worked better for them _and_ they were able to get some extra money on top. Then you have MS playing catch up and trying to merge mobile and desktop in all the wrong ways with 8 and the userbase shrunk. What was left was OS X and I'm not sure what happened there.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Windows 98 had its own flavor of network-powered "desktop gadgets", with its Active Desktop. It was supposed to download updated Web content in the background, with a homegrown RSS-like technology. It was quite modern for its time.