A widget app built by one person, for people who love their desktop.

Windows used to have widgets — gadgets, sidebars, the works. Then Microsoft quietly killed them, and the third-party scene split in two: powerful tools like Rainmeter that asked you to spend an evening editing config files, and a long graveyard of abandoned apps that hadn’t been touched in years.

I wanted something in between. A desktop widget app that felt modern, looked like it belonged on Windows 11, and let me drop a clock or a CPU monitor on my screen in two clicks — no skin packs, no .ini files, no tinkering. When I couldn’t find one, I started building it.

The first version was called WidgetsBox. It was a scrappy WPF app with about 38 widgets, built on weekends, with no real plan beyond “does anyone else want this?” The answer turned out to be yes — people downloaded it, used it daily, and started asking for more.

That feedback was the most useful thing I got out of v1. People told me what was missing, what was confusing, and what they wished worked differently. After a couple of years of patching v1 while it groaned under the weight of features it was never designed for, I made the call to throw it out and start over.

WidgetSpark is that rebuild. Same idea, completely new foundation. The catalog grew from 38 to over 100. Widgets don’t just display info anymore — they actually control things, like volume, brightness, microphone, and caffeine state. Every widget can be repositioned, resized, and themed individually, and the whole layout is restored exactly the way you left it after a reboot.

Under the hood, the rendering pipeline is built so each widget stays cheap even when you stack twenty of them on screen. The installer is under 20 MB. Updates and licensing flow through the Microsoft Store, so there’s no installer hunting and no trust issues.

WidgetSpark is for people who want their desktop to feel like theirs without spending an evening editing config files. If you’ve ever bounced off Rainmeter because the learning curve was too steep, or installed a sleek-looking widget app from the Store only to find it was abandoned in 2019, you’re exactly the person I built this for.

It’s also for people who just want a nicer-looking clock. No judgment. The free tier exists for a reason.

I also run APIVerve, an API platform with hundreds of endpoints for things like weather, dictionary, currency exchange, crypto prices, and more. A lot of WidgetSpark’s data widgets are powered by it. That vertical integration is part of why a solo dev can ship a widget catalog this large without the whole thing collapsing under the weight of a dozen third-party API keys.

The near-term roadmap is honest and short:

• More widgets — community-requested and the ones I keep wanting myself.
• A sticker / community widget SDK so other people can build for the platform.
• macOS and Linux support, eventually. No promises on dates.
• Smaller, faster, less buggy — every release.

I’d rather under-promise and ship than hype features that aren’t real yet.

Honestly? Because every time I see a screenshot of someone’s desktop in the wild and notice WidgetSpark widgets sitting on it, I get a little jolt of “huh, that’s mine.” If this app ends up on a few thousand desktops where people actually use it every day, that’s enough for me. Anything beyond that is gravy.

Thanks for reading. If you give WidgetSpark a try and find something that bugs you, tell me — I read everything.