Widget: Encyclopedia - Widget

Widget

Widget is a general-purpose term, or placeholder name, for any unspecified device, including those that have not yet been invented. It is commonly used in textbook and other examples where the identity of the product or function is irrelevant and could be distracting: students may be asked to design a business plan for the XYZ Widget Company. Compare Acme.

The alt.usage.english Usenet newsgroup FAQ gives the origin of "widget" as the 1924 play "Buxton on Horseback", by George Kaufman and Marc Connelly, as an invented term for the product manufactured by one of the characters; that the protagonist never learns just what "widgets" are is part of the point. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its usage only back to 1931, in a volume of American Speech.

Widget - Specific widgets

Though "widget" or "widgets" usually refers to small unspecified devices, it has, in a strange twist, become the name of certain specific ones as well.

Widget - Floating widget in canned beer

The 'floating widget' found in cans of beer is a hollow sphere, 3 cm (1.2 in) in diameter. The can is pressurized by adding liquid nitrogen, which vaporises and expands in volume after the can is sealed, forcing gas and beer into the widget's hollow interior through tiny holes. When the can is opened, the pressure in the can drops, causing the pressurized gas inside the widget to jet out from the holes. The holes in the widget are angled slightly so that the widget spins, creating a creamy head inside the can. This imitates the foamy head created when pouring draught beer. The original widget was patented in the UK by Boddingtons.

The word "widget" as applied to this device is a trademark of the Guinness brewery.

Widget - Graphical component in computing

In computing, widgets are components of graphical user interfaces (GUI) that the user interacts with, and also small helper-type applications. See widget (computing) and widget toolkit.

• wxWidgets (formerly known as wxWindows) is an open source, cross-platform widget toolkit.
• The Gimp Toolkit (GTK+) is an open source, cross-platform widget toolkit, popular in X window system desktop environments.

• Apple Computer's Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger) operating system includes Dashboard, a transparent layer that displays mini applications, or "widgets". Because they are coded with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, many web developers can already build them. See widget (computing).

• Yahoo! Widget Engine (formerly called Konfabulator) is an application that allows users to run and build mini-applications, or "Widgets". Unlike Mac OS X Tiger's Dashboard, which runs exclusively on the Mac, the Yahoo! Widget Engine is cross-platform, meaning both Windows and Mac users can use the same widgets on either system.

• Kapsules, a free project for Microsoft Windows that first aimed to replicate the above Mac OS X v10.4 functionality, and is now compatible with many scripting languages.

Widget - Device in Marvel Comics

See Widget (comics).

Widget - Other uses

• Widget is also a cartoon character from the early 1990's, in Widget, the World Watcher.

• "Widget" is the brand name of a small, razor-edged scraping tool. When the tool was introduced in the 1980s, an advertising campaign incorporated the tagline "What's a Widget?"

• The New York World Journal Tribune was a newspaper that existed for 8 months in 1966-67. The initials WJT gave rise to the nickname "the Widget".

See also

• metasyntactic variable
• gadget

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Widget", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki