Put Live Web Pages on your Desktop

Internet Explorer has a feature called Web Slices that lets you track changes on certain pages from the favorites bar itself. Such a thing is not available in Firefox but you can use FireClip or Ubiquity and track portions of any web page in the browser – these portions could be from a Google results page, a customized view of your email inbox or even a live score card that you may have pulled from the ESPN site.

Now imagine if we could move out of the web browser and save these snippets of web pages on the desktop itself just like any other widget.

Add Snippets of Live Web Pages to your Desktop

What you see above aren’t static screenshots of websites but snippets of live web pages that will even refresh automatically after a set interval. They are created using Snippage, a free Adobe AIR utility available for both Mac and Windows.

Snippage, in simple English, lets you instantly turn any web page (or just a portion) into a desktop gadget (or widget depending on whether you are using a Windows PC or a Mac).

Snippage works like this – you open any web page using the built-in browser, select a rectangular portion on that page desktop by dragging around the handles and then click the scissor icon to crop that area and place it on the desktop.

If you are adding a stock chart or time-critical search results (say from twitter), you may want to change the refresh interval so that the clips reload automatically and you always have access to the latest information from your desktop.

Watch the video below to get a better idea on how you can create web clips for the desktop with snippage.

Screencast Video: How to turn web pages into desktop widgets