Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT
If free software development goes by trends, then the current era might be called the Age of Extensions. In the last few years, every application from the Mozilla family to OpenOffice.org to Gedit has created frameworks in which developers can add their own small bits of functionality to an application. In the last 10 months or so, a community has taken this trend directly to the desktop with what it calls "screenlets" -- small applications that are added directly to the desktop. The result is dozens of tools, some new and many old, that are in most cases not only themable, but also heavily customizable.