For quite some time now widgets have been growing in popularity and are cluttering our desktops. I think widgets can indeed make your life easier and I have been using widgets since Vista was released. Widgets I have been using since that day are notes, RSS news and stock index. At that time I was using the Vista Sidebar widgets but I was unsatisfied with the often bloated and poorly designed widgets available in the Windows Live Gallery. I needed something that I could fully customize to my own needs.

After a quest around the internet I stumbled upon Rainmeter, which was an abandoned project at that time. Rainmeter is a Windows customization application capable of showing widgets (Rainmeter calls them applets) on your desktop.

The application comes with a lot of presets as can be seen on the image above. There are also a lot of presets available for download. More important for me though was the ability the make my own widgets, which turned out to be pretty easy if you have some basic knowledge about the concept. I needed a widget that showed the stock index of my own country (AEX) and I had it working within an hour. By keeping the design minimal my widgets now blend in perfectly with my clean desktop. I just love it!