Yoink

This is one of those widgets that makes me not regret sifting through the growing pile of new (and mostly useless) widgets on a semi-daily basis. Yoink (an appropriate name you either get or don’t) is really clever. Basically it just takes a snapshot of a website and presents it as a thumbnail on your dashboard. You can set it to grab a new thumbnail every set amount of time or only when text changes. You then have access to the three most recent thumbnails. Clicking the thumbnail launches the website.

What’s really neat about this is that it fills a nice gap between reading via RSS and manually checking a site. The first page I loaded in was the Drudge Report because it doesn’t have an RSS feed and changes content very regularly. It’s also one of those sites that you only need to glance at to tell if it’s been updated. If Drudge and his sirens don’t do it for you, most news sites operate under similar principals and reflect a prominent visual change when there is a significant update. Though CNN’s headline wasn’t readable at the smallest size.

Another site I’ll use this for is ESPN since they change the front page and add new articles about twice a day with a corresponding lead image.

My only complaint (one that I have about most widgets) is that even it’s smallest size still takes up too much Dashboard real estate. I’d prefer something one size smaller or an option to temporarily collapse the thumbnail into an icon that I could click to check when I wanted to.

That and a few 1.0 glitches aside Yoink is worth checking out.