Technofile: A little puzzle. A calculator. A clock. A little notepad. Tiny little applications make our lives easier. Why not link them to the internet and make them more functional?

We're used to getting gadgets in physical form. But applets - little pieces of software that are mini applications in their own right - can run alongside real applications and are easily accessed at any time.

Apple, ever the artful observer, "borrowed" for its Dashboard application from Microsoft's Active Desktop idea back in the mid-1990s which never took off at the time.

But then, almost certainly, Microsoft got the idea from the desk accessories from the original 1984 Macintosh. At the time an Apple engineer realised that, since the entire screen was supposed to be a metaphorical desktop, the little programs could be just like desk ornaments.

Then, in the last couple of years, along came Konfabulator. Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to.

Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols and even give your current local weather.

Konfabulator's widgets are cool though, becuase they look great and work both on Macs and PCs. It's even possible to create your own widgets.

Konfabulator emerged in 2000 when Arlo Rose decided he wanted a cool looking battery monitor and something that told him the weather. He realised the possibilities for something like this could potentially be limitless.

A half year later, Konfabulator for Macintosh was ready for download, prior to the Windows versions coming out. The argument about whether Dashboard ripped off Konfabulator's idea rages on. Meantime, we can all enjoy these great little gadgets for our desktop.

Here are some of the best: The Ask Jeeves widget keep an eye on the latest news and finds an answer to your question on the web.

Word of the Day will display the Word of the Day from dictionary.com. Sing that iTune! is a full-featured lyric widget for iTunes which will let you sing along to tracks by displaying the lyrics.

Widget Television is effectively digital broadband television on your desktop, which provides one-click access to hundres of streaming TV channels on the web. Radar In Motion displays live and updated weather maps.

Perhaps you need some ideas for dinner? You can quickly search all recipes.com from your Dashboard with their widget.

Nostalgia buffs will like Asteroid Run, the game that will propel you back in time to the 1980s. Additionally, the Sudoku widget will generate and play Sudoku puzzles for you.

MSN Virtual Earth can allow you to ping and zoom in on the planet, while Wikipedia's widget allows you to search for and view articles from the massive online wiki encyclopedia right on the desktop.

Some of the more fun ones include the Yoda widget. With this you enter a sentence into a text box, hit enter, the widget records the words and then speaks the generated text out loud. For example: you type "I am Yoda." and Yoda will say: "Yoda, I am", á la Star Wars.

So go and decorate your desktop with some widgets - they might just make life just a little, easier and fun.