The term is used fairly loosely, in that many such applications are more complex internally and in operation than the simple applets that are called 'widgets' in other contexts.

Social networking services such as Facebook and Myspace host these applications and provide them underlying platform services (such as display and storage of user-provided photos and other content, profile information about end users and communications features with other users) through special-purpose application programming interfaces. A 'widget application' is a third party web widget developed for a social networking service, with the user interface or the entire application hosted by the network service.smart phones).Ī web widget is a portable application installed and executed, typically by non-expert webmasters on HTML-based web pages, to offer site visitors shopping, advertisements, videos, or other simple functionality from third party widget publishers. A mobile widget is the comparable equivalent for mobile devices (i.e. A Widget toolkit is a set of programming tools that help developers reuse GUI widgets to build a user interface.Ī desktop widget is a specialized GUI widget intended to run on a computer desktop for computer users to control simple utility functions such as clocks, messaging services, and calendars. In this context a widget may refer to a generic GUI element such as a check box, to an instance of that element, or to a customized collection of such elements used for a specific function or application (such as a dialog box for users to customize their computer screen appearances). Primary types Ī Graphical control element (GUI widget) is part of a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows a computer user to control and change the appearance of elements for operating a software application. Because the term, and the coding practice, has been extant since at least the 1980s, it has been applied in a number of contexts.

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