Different posts widget with images.

Right now I’m using some custom coding to add post images to my related posts plugin. It search for images in this order: 1) featured image, 2) first image in the post, 3) default image.

Would be neat if this could be made available with other post lists, like:
– recent posts
– popular posts (based on views, comments, etc)
– other posts in this category
– etc.

I’m combining all of this with TimThumb to fix scaling problems. If you’re interested I can fwd you what I have already.