Jealous of some of those Mac desktop widgets – the sort that tell the time, provide a weather forecast and so on? Uninspired by the equivalent Windows gadgets as found in the Windows Sidebar? Kludget Engine may offer just the solution – it’s capable of allowing you to run selected widgets designed for the Mac OS on your Windows desktop, and the first stable version of the program has been released after roughly a year in beta.

Widgets are small standalone applications that are designed to run directly from the desktop or within a specific window, sidebar or parent application. Kludget Engine is yet another example of a third-party Windows application that extends this functionality to Windows – Vista and Windows 7 users have the built-in Windows Sidebar, plus there are options from Yahoo! and the Desktop Sidebar, which runs in older versions of Windows.

What makes the Kludget Engine stand apart from other similar tools is that it doesn’t add its own widget standard to the mix, but provides support for widgets found in both Mac OS and the Opera web browser, enabling the end user to access them from the desktop.

It’s not 100 per cent compatible, sadly: many Mac OS widgets, particularly those providing some form of interactivity – won’t work. Download the “stock” widgets – those bundled with Mac OS – from the Kludget website and then visit the Apple Widgets site to try your luck with other widgets.

Kludget Engine 1.0 runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7.