It seems like yesterday that Adobe released Apollo, oh, wait that was just two-days ago. 
To help commemorate the event YourMinis has just released an Apollo application that will bring online widgets into your offline world!
YourMinis is a website that offers a ton of widgets for you to place on a homepage. They have a wonderful tabbed interface that helps prevent too many widgets from cluttering up one page, and best of all is that they offer an extension for Firefox so that your widgets can be accessed in just one click.
Now, however, you can take your favorite widgets offline with you as you add them to your desktop. In order to use the widgets outside of your browser you’ll first need to get the Apollo runtime which is available for both Windows and Mac. Then, like any normal application, you’ll need to install the yourminis air file by downloading and running it. You should see a window similar to this when you execute the “air” file:
Apollo treats this as if you were installing a real application. An entry for the YourMinis Widget Manager will even be added to the uninstall screen (Add/Remove Programs in Windows XP) in case you decide to remove it later on.
After setup completes you’ll see some default widgets already placed on your desktop. After a little configuration you can start to get things just how you like them:
In the upper-right corner you’ll see the Widget Manager. I like to refer to it as the light switch for the widgets. Each widget is represented as a little box, and clicking on one of the boxes will show/hide that widget.
The coolest thing is that you should be able to go to the YourMinis Widget site and select any widget to “copy to desktop”. That’s how it should theoretically work, but on my Vista machine the entire Widget Manager application crashed every time that I tried to load a new widget from the site. That was extremely disappointing because there are a few widgets that I would have liked to use on my computer.
The other thing that this desperately needs in order to become a “real” widget application is a shortcut key to show/hide all of the widgets. When people want to see their widgets they don’t want to go scrounging around looking for an icon or minimizing their windows…they just want to hit a key and have them popup.
I’m sure the YourMinis team will be getting around to adding more great things later on, and hopefully fixing the bug that I found. Maybe they’ll even start offering some sort of option where you can display the tabs from your customized start page. Right now you have to add the gadgets that you want because the application is completely independent of your online settings. Also, a tabbed interface for a desktop widget program, similar to what they offer for their online version, would give them something that no other gadget/widget application currently offers. After all, tabs are the hot thing these days…all the kids are doing it!
Hello, i’m on vista too but i didn’t get the crash problem. I added from the yourminis a new widget and the manager didn’t crash. I am on vista business and the UAC is disabled (hate that thing …..
).
I just enabled the UAC yesterday after having it offer for nearly a month, go figure. I’m almost positive that is what the problem is now that you say that. Yourminis probably wasn’t able to write to the directory that it was installed in which will be a big problem for them.
Hi, I’m one of the developers for yourminis.com. I’m sorry to hear it crashed on you, we really haven’t tested extensively in Vista. This is a very early release for us the we quickly pushed out the door for the Apollo launch, so expect things to get only better. I like the idea of tabs on the desktop, possible synced up with ones on the web. We’ll be getting features like that as soon as we can!
-Hart
Once you do that I think the service would be really amazing. I’d be much more willing to use the YourMinis gadgets over Vista’s if I was able to get a nice tabbed interface for them and have them synced with a homepage. That just sounds golden!