A while back, when the AJAX toolkit was in it's initial form, I created a sample that used a then new technology called Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets) to create a couple of desktop widgets.  At the time, it was a pretty cool and powerful way to bring salesforce.com and platform data to your desktop.

Since then, I have had the great pleasure of working with Ron Hess (Platform Evangelist for salesforce.com) and James Ward (Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe) from Adobe.  Together, over a 7 day span, we ported the current AJAX toolkit to Flex and ActionScript.  The result is the ability to create Rich Internet Applications (ala AJAX) that natively and easily use the salesforce.com platform as the data layer. 

This also means that, since Adobe Apollo is based on Flex, you can create these RIAs outside of the browser.  Thanks to a great demo application in the category of "Stupid Apollo Tricks" called Bounce that illustrates a full screen, transparent apollo application, I started thinking again about desktop widgets.  That of course lead back to the original K-widget, the modified Day Planner widget, that shows events and tasks assigned to you in salesforce.com.  This is the simplest thing that I thought I could make that might be useful. 

I have published a wiki page here were you can learn about this widget app and examine, download, and leverage the sample code.  This Apollo app is just a proof of concept and likely has some bugs, but with the rich component set and functionality of Flex/Apollo (not the least interesting of which is charting) it is my sincere hope that you will create very compelling and diverse widget type Apollo apps.