Widgetarium, an IDE for widget coding

While I might have switched off my Dashboard widgets due to er, performance issues, I still appreciate how many people find them useful. So if you have a hankering to get into the widget business, take a look at the Widgetarium. It's a pretty complete IDE for making widgets. The neatest feature for me was the virtual Dashboard client. You can test your widgets without having to reinstall and launch 'em. The GUI takes just a little bit of effort to get used to, but there's a good tutorial from Gandreas Software, the developers.

And speaking of developers, you widget coders out there might be interested in one other feature: "Special Extensions: Widgets created using Widgetarium have access to special additional routines to perform a wide variety of actions not available to JavaScript. These include creating Spotlight queries, sound and speech, and direct integration of AppleScript scripts with your Widget." Excellent.

Unfortunately, the product is still in beta. There are some limitations (you can't base a widget on the Calculator), and as always, YMMMV.