I just installed this nifty little tool called Konfabulator on my Windows XP machine and it rocks!
Mac users would be familiar with those widgets–small floating applets–that come with Mac OS X (starting with Tiger) that you can install and modify, and usually accessible with the F12 key.
What the heck are widgets? They’re basically mini-applications that run constantly in the background. ‘Net-connected widgets are ready to provide you with useful information, independent of a web-browser.
What makes it great? You can actually choose from and download among hundreds of widgets and run them on your desktop as independent applications with lives of their own. Some of them are useful, and many are not. But eye candy some widgets may be, it’s a welcome relief from the same old boring modern desktop interface.
It’s yet another taste of Mac on Windows. Rain wrote about Konfabulator as one of the hacks/mods that will make your Windows experience more Mac-like.
The default installation comes with an analog clock, a PIM overview applet (that queries either Outlook or iCalendar), a task list, and system and network monitors, among others. You can dock the applets on your desktop, or just make them float like normal windows. Or you can simply call up Konsposé, the app’s equivalent of the Mac OS Exposé, where all the active widgets are displayed onscreen on top of the regular windows for you to do your choosing.
Konfabulator is available for MacOS, too. The developers say they love the Mac platform so much that they envision everything to be cross platform. Some even prefer Konfabulator to OS X Tiger’s own widgets system.
As for the developer community, software creators will have yet another great platform to develop applets on (perhaps some malicious?). Konfabulator is open-source: anyone can author a widget on just about anything. And they can be assured of a cross-platform user base.
While Konfabulator used to be commercial (i.e., pay) software, Yahoo! just bought the company that made it and is now releasing the app for free. The developers even promised that they will never put up ads on Konfabulator itself. The business model? It will serve as a launch-pad for other services.
Try it out. It’s fun and useful.
5 comments
I’ve been using Konfabulator since it went free several weeks (a few months?) ago, and I must say that it really isn’t much. I mean, it isn’t anything truly revolutionary.
You really won’t enjoy it much if you don’t have MacOSX’s expose function or a big monitor with a high resolution so you’d have extra space to keep your widgets. Otherwise, your widgets will either be relegated to the background underneath all of your regular apps, or taking up space on your screen and potentially blocking your view of stuff.
And a lot of the widgets are for people that are _always_ connected. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those people. 🙁
i just installed Konfabulator on mine. it’s cool. Yahoo! has again something to beat google desktop. 😉
Hi Bit!
Konfabulator has its own Konspose function, which works pretty much like Mac OS X’s Expose for Widgets. If you don’t have the extra space (like myself–I try to get by with 1024×768 on my 14″ laptop screen), you can always just press that Konspose button to bring up all your Widgets. Or if they’re docked on the desktop, you can minimize all windows, instead.
But I do understand that to some, it’s nothing really revolutionary–especially for the Mac users. But for Windows users trying to squeeze out all the functionality out of their systems, this is something cool.
I guess it’s the coolness factor that makes it interesting.
Mr. Nice Ash,
Try searching for new widgets via Google or even Yahoo’s own Konfabulator site. It’s like installing extensions on your Firefox browser.
parehas lang po ba to ng DesktopX ng Object Desktop?
I forgot about Konspose. Hehe. Well, it’s still not as eye-catching as Expose. 😛