First of all, a hearty thank you to all our friends running Leopard for your patience over the last few weeks. We’re very happy to announce the latest version of Yahoo! Widgets has arrived, and we hope you agree it was worth the wait. It’s officially called Yahoo! Widgets 4.5, and there are a lot of major changes under the hood.

Putting the .5 in Yahoo! Widgets 4.5
So, what exactly is it that we’ve been cooking up here in Widgetland these last few months? In this version, we’ve got more detailed security disclosures to give users a better sense of what a Widget can do before it runs, a rearchitected core along with a full W3C-compliant Document Object Model (DOM), as well as support for Flash and HTML. What does all this mean? Basically, we’re extending the platform to enable Widget authors to create richer and more powerful desktop Widgets (like ones that run video, w00t!). And at the same time, we’re also making it even easier for people to use their existing skills (and maybe even some code) to create a desktop Widget on Yahoo!.

New Widgets to Love
We’ve also got a few cool new and improved Widgets, like our very own Yahoo! Finance Widget and Widgets from our friends at the NBA and RockYou!. You will find these Widgets in our Widget Spotlight on the front page of the new Yahoo! Widget Gallery over the next few weeks. These partners share our vision of delivering compelling experiences to their audiences on the desktop, and we’re very happy they’ve chosen our platform to do so.

Sharing the Widget Platform Love
We’re also very pleased to announce integration with several leading Widget creation and distribution platforms. As announced at the Widget Summit a few weeks ago, the thousands of Widgets built using the Netvibes UWA will now be available on your desktop as Yahoo! Widgets from the Netvibes Ecosystem. Additionally, Clearspring is now including the option to add the many web Widgets they power, from partners like NBC Universal and Time, to your desktop as Yahoo! Widgets. And by the end of this year, MuseStorm will be supporting output to Yahoo! Widgets for their partners, like CBS and Universal Music Group, as part of their forthcoming platform release.

Giving You More of What You Love
All of this is part of our mission to deliver users of Yahoo! Widgets more of the content and services they love, right on their desktops. To achieve that, we are focused on three things:

1. Making our platform as powerful and secure as possible. We firmly believe that the best desktop Widgets combine the power of the desktop – including things like access to local resources, more powerful processing, and offline access – with the fun of the Internet in ways that are unique from what can be done in a browser. That’s why we added features like canvas and a SQLite database in Yahoo! Widgets 4 and why we added the new security model, video support, and full DOM in 4.5.
2. Making the most Widgets available to our users. While we strongly encourage authors to build Widgets that take the fullest possible advantage of our platform (see above), we also want to make it as easy as possible for authors to create and deliver the Widgets *they* want. Whether that means using the languages they already know – like HTML and Flash, the code they’ve already written, or the partners they’ve already chosen – like Clearspring, MuseStorm, and Netvibes, we want to be as open and accessible a platform as possible. Some people have feared that making the platform too easy to develop on will dilute the quality of Widgets in our Widget Gallery. We believe that quality control is something that should be handled by the community, which brings us to our third objective.
3. Creating the best Widget discovery and management experiences. Sorting through over 4,300 Widgets is a nice problem to have, but we still want to solve it. And the new Yahoo! Widget Gallery site and its underlying infrastructure are the solution. You’ll find a bunch of new features in the site today, like improved search, ratings, reviews, tags, and our Beautiful/Useful/Fun meter (more details here). All of this and the exciting things to come are designed to connect the right audiences with the Widgets they’ll love. You’ve also seen the beginnings of our efforts to improve the Widget management experience in the Widget Dock that was released with Yahoo! Widgets 4. While we’ve focused the 4.5 release on extending and opening up the underlying platform and have thus made limited changes to the Dock, we will be making improvements there as well in forthcoming versions.

So, there you have it: a not-so-brief overview of what’s in Yahoo! Widgets 4.5, and some context on how this release fits into our overall direction. What are you waiting for? Go check out Yahoo! Widgets 4.5! We hope you like it.

Thanks,
- the Yahoo! Widgets team

P.S. Ed will be posting a more in depth technical overview of Konfabulator™ 4.5 (the developer platform update) shortly. And you can always check out our version history for the full details on this release.