I am stoked on Sprout, the super-simple Flash widget builder.
Its interface is intuitive and its features are completely customizable, right down to the opacity of rollover animations. What's better, Sprout provides interfaces for users of all levels. RGB freaks and those who have no idea what those letters stand for will be equally happy and able to change their background colors.
After a couple of hours of playing around, I had a mildly useful widget. I call it The Tweetbox:
This embeddable widget provides my latest Twitter post and the most recent post from my friends list, both of which have forward and backward navigation. Along with those is a little jukebox that plays one of my favorite songs of the moment, "It's A Fact (Mano remix feat. Hollywood Holt)" by Matt & Kim. Not exactly an app that folks will scramble for, but it will make a nice little addition to my iGoogle page.
Being in beta, Sprout's not without its bugs. I made multiple attempts at uploading other songs, with seemingly random success. Still, I wholly agree with Mashable's assessment about its future:
"With the continued addition of design options and components from third-party partners, Sprout could conceivably become a bit like your FriendFeed on steroids, with you getting to control, customize, and own (via your own web site) the entire design and user experience."
Part of Sprout's real use is as a marketing tool. Check out the Gallery to see some examples of more professional widgets, like the Erykah Badu Media Player. With the release of its SDK, there are sure to be lots of these coming out on MySpace, Facebook and other widget-friendly sites.
On a final note that has little to do with its functionality: One of my favorite things about Sprout is that you don't have to create an account to start playing around. Only when you want to save or publish your work are you required to sign up. This is a great model, and one that I hope more apps will adopt as they realize we're all suffering from registration fatigue.
