I don’t remember who, but in my recent feed reading someone said that Adobe’s Apollo was going to be a great thing. So I installed it last night only to be left confused on what I was doing.

Apollo is basically an invisible application that you can run mini applications on. Much like Yahoo Widget Engine or Apple’s Dashboard. Only instead of small widgets, Apollo’s idea is to make full blown applications like an RSS reader. Once created for Apollo, they’ll work on Mac and PC without any extra coding. It really sounds like a cool idea, as long as users adopt it.

Google Desktop has a fun sidebar feature that can be used to show off Google widgets. However, this is only available on Windows.

Erica Joy (I think she works for Google) figured out a simple work-around. Well kind of.

Since Firefox can load any web page in the sidebar, she said that you just have to put all your favorite widgets in the left column of your Google personalized homepage, then bookmark it, get the bookmark properties and check the ‘load in sidebar’ box. That’s it.

It’s simple, it’s easy and yet none of us thought of that. Check out Erica’s blog for more detailed information.

I’ve recently started checking out Opera 9 Beta I’m not sure why I stumbled across it but I have to say, it’s quite a nice browser.

Now I’m a Firefox guy and there are to many good features to pass up, but Opera is pretty slick too. They’ve added support for WYSIWYG editors like those in Wordpress blogs. They’ve also got a built in RSS reader, spell check, ad blocker, themes and widgets.