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Widget or gadget: Which is it?
July 9, 2008
So maybe in the last few months, you have been hearing technology 'gurus' casually insert the terms widgets and gadgets into their presentations or discussions. When I completed my secondary education, widget was an accounting or operations terms for units of a product. Gadgets were devices that were too complicated to really understand and you were certain to become known as a nerd if you bought too many of them.
Today, these terms represent small, self-contained programs capable of running independently of a larger application. Some examples of widgets/gadgets are the clock and calendar features on an Apple computer or the embedded YouTube videos and Flickr images on websites. A lot of people use the words ‘widget’ and ‘gadget’ interchangeably, but do they really mean the same thing?
In a recent demonstration, a supplier was using the word ‘gadget’ which I understood as ‘widget’, resulting in a bit of confusion. We had to pause the conversation to establish a definition. This confusion awakened my desire to understand the differences between ‘widget’ and ‘gadget’.
Wikipedia defines widgets as “interactive virtual tools that provide single-purpose services such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather… or even a language translator, among other things. Examples of widget engines include: … Microsoft gadgets in Windows Vista…”
Wikipedia defines gadgets as “computer programs that provide services without needing an independent application to be launched for each one, but instead run in an environment that manages multiple gadgets,” and then adds “See: Google Gadgets, Microsoft Gadgets, Apple Widgets.”
Wikipedia defines Microsoft ‘Gadgets’ as “desktop widgets.”
MSNBC uses ‘widget’ and ‘gadget’ interchangeably, as demonstrated in an article from 2006 stating, “thanks to widgets, taking multiple steps to track down headlines in one place and then check your e-mail in another may seem woefully outdated this time next year. These mini-applications—also called ‘gadgets’—are simple bits of code”
As a last resort to find any discernable difference between the two words I went to an online dictionary and looked up ‘widget’. Two definitions were given, the first simply being “GADGET”.
All of the above examples define ‘widget’ and ‘gadget’ in terms of each other, which makes it seem that they are truly interchangeable. But then why don’t we have one word for both ‘widget’ and ‘gadget’? Why were my colleague and I unable to communicate while we were each using a different word for the same thing?
Do ‘widget’ and ‘gadget’ truly mean the same thing? Are we going to forever be confused when one person uses ‘widget’ and another uses ‘gadget’? Are we doomed to linger in semantic uncertainty?
Well, it seems that all gadgets are widgets, but not all widgets are gadgets. Gadgets are a subset of widgets, with the distinctive property of being proprietary.
Widgets can be divided into two types: web-based widgets and desktop widgets. John Curtis of
Quotient (a company also known as btqnet) defines a web widget as “a web based mini application, typically self contained, includes javascript, and through which you could easily put something on somebody else’s site – the widget will go back to your server to provide functionality into someone else’s server.” The photo-sharing website Flickr provides a great example. If you want to share your photos on either a personal website or a social network, you can just upload your photos to Flickr and use their code (personalized to your account) and embed it into your web page. This embedded code, or script, will allow users access to your photos, which are hosted on Flicker, through your website. Further, users will be able to use many of the functionalities Flickr provides through this widget.
Widgets are also available on Apple and Microsoft desktops. Apple is notorious for their widgets which are downloadable for use on your desktop providing such programs as a clock and currency converter to a blood alcohol content calculator and personal horoscopes via Astrology.com’s ‘Dashtrology’ widget. Yahoo provides widgets for both your Microsoft and Mac desktop, with such widgets from a simple typing speedometer to ‘Radio France Live’ that gives you access to six French radio stations.
So a widget is typically a self contained mini application, which is platform independent with the exception of Apple widgets, which are usable only on Apple operating systems. So we know what a widget is, but then what is a gadget?
Well, as defined in this article a gadget is “any widget that is not a widget,” or as I defined it above, gadgets are widgets with the distinctive property of being proprietary. For example, Microsoft Vista has gadgets, which are widgets that work only on Microsoft Vista. Further, Google has their own set of gadgets that users can add to their websites and/or Google desktop. Although Google’s gadgets are technically widgets and they can be used on any website, Google decided to use the term ‘gadget’ to make all of our lives harder.
So to clear things up:
1) use the term ‘widget’ when talking about mini self contained web and Apple desktop applications,
2) use ‘gadget’ when talking about Microsoft and Google self contained applications, and
3) don’t think about this as hard as I did.
Posted by Stephen Nold on July 9, 2008 | Comments (4)
