On March 1st, Stardock will release DesktopX Pro. It's a $69.95 version of DesktopX designed for power users and software developers who are interested in turning their widgets into completely stand-alone program.

A gadget is essentially the same as a widget but with one key difference - they don't require any run-times or anything else in order to run. A gadget can be sent to anyone running Windows 2000/XP and run.

This may present an opportunity for ambitious software developers who recognize that there's a big world besides clocks and calendars and RSS feeds. That's because DesktopX 3 has direct access to a great deal of the underlying Windows APIs. In other words, the types of programs one might have created with Visual Basic in the past for release on-line can be created with DesktopX Pro with a lot less effort and with all the cool visuals included.

To facilitate developers, Stardock will be launching a new site in April called DesktopGadgets.com.  On it, developers can upload their gadgets, set their price (free or any amount they choose), and if it passes moderation the gadget then becomes available for sale with the developer and the site splitting the proceeds.

Stardock hopes that this will open up a whole new category of software development and increase the quality of available gadgets and widgets available.