Screaming Penguin

This is Mac specific of course, but Dashcode is pretty sweet. It was recently mentioned in MacBreak, and that is what pointed me to it. Dashcode is a full featured IDE for Dashboard widgets, which includes WYSIWYG support, and a set of templates for common projects. Using it, you can create a widget in literally seconds. The Screaming-Penguin.com RSS feed widget took under a minute (and yes, the graphics I used, scraped from the site, suck, but the point was quick and dirty, not actual effort). The projects Dashcode has templates for are: There is really nothing very difficult about any of it, and it is free, and it will get you familiar with the basics of the XCode type Apple dev environment (it is NOT XCode itself, but it is XCode like in terms of the UI). If you create something nice, don't forget to share it on Widgipedia.