Reallusion's WidgetCast

WidgetCast caters to the world of Web 2.0 and constantly-connected social media by providing a tool that allows you to package your content as micro-applications that can easily be shared anywhere Flash can go. It's useful, it's fun, it's quick...and at $69-199, Sprout does the same thing for a heck of a lot cheaper.

On first inspection, WidgetCast reminds me very much of the Sprout Builder: an application that lets you create web-ready Flash widgets that can be easily embedded as part of an existing page or that can be used as a complete content vehicle.

The primary purpose of WidgetCast is the creation of interactive microapplications - whether outputting Twitter or RSS content, YouTube video, feedback forms, Flickr galleries, advertising, or user-interactive avatars. Although I found the existing templates a bit hokey, they do get the idea across as far as WidgetCast's capabilities.

While you can produce interactive web content from scratch via WC, it's better suited for wrapping your existing content up in a prettier package - delivering your media as a Web 2.0-ready application, rather than just embedded flatly in a standard web page. This it does well, although you'll do well to remember the "garbage in, garbage out" adage. WidgetCast can polish, mix, and mash your content with ease, adding a sleek gloss; it can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

I'm not fond of the user interface. It's slick, it's shiny, it's entirely clunky and lacking in any sort of intuitive flow. I'll take functional over pretty any day, and in this WidgetCast (to quote Bill Engvall) is about 15 degrees off cool. While awkward, though, it's still usable - and it's worth dealing with a little fumbling for the overall features provided.