Yep while sitting down with a home brew and watching the Kiwis thrash the Ozzies in the bledisloe cup…(had to get that on in ;o) ) I sat down and started prototyping an application in C#.

I run Konfabulator cause its as close to widgets ill get on a PC *Sigh*. But I got to wondering why no-one had made something like this for flash. I especially like the feature where you can hide the widgets and bring them up when you press a key i.e. F8. So I have made an application to do exactly this but for flash. At this point im quickly creating it in C# because well its quick! and I can get the classes sorted. Then I will go back and re-write it (with some help) in C++.

At the moment I have it minimizing to the task bar on keypress and loading in a single instance of a flash movie 

 Major points so far:
It can load swfs from the net or file system.
Im working on having a user defined image as the background(but standard gradient will be less resource intensive
Im working on creating an interface for flash to call one of those windows balloons in the task bar using Flash 8's external Interface, cause it sounds like a cool feature. this will give a means of notifing a user if say new news is availble.
Stores all settings in xml so the flash widgets can access that (xml docs location will be made available through API)

I have a bit to do to get it to a beta stage but when it arrives there I will release it for free. Unfortunately at this point it will require the .Net framework to be installed but like I said I will be refactoring it for c++ )

If anyone has any suggestions on functionality please leave comments as I am looking to add anything that sounds cool. Also if any .Net programmers have had any experience in embeding the activeX control could you please tell me how to make the movies background transparent?

Heres a screenShot of it running xsive.co.nz as a widget. 

Should be a cool little app.