Widgets for the Poor Masses
A few days ago I found out that the wonderful people at Pixoria have released Konfabulator 1.8.1, for Mac & PC!say I was exstatic and nearly broke my left mouse button clicking on the download link.
I have long envied OSXers with access to these indespensible little buggers, and man did I have good reason! One of the new features since the 1.7 version is called Konsposé. This, when F8 is pressed, hides the desktop under a semi-opaque background and shows just your open widgets for easy access and manipulation. I like it because I can have bigger widgets like rss feeds that take up more desktop space hidden until I wish to look at them. I press F8, check out what I need, and click anywhere in the background or hit F8 again, and am right back at the desktop.
I couldn’t even begin to list all of the usefull widgets in the Widget Gallery, but I’ll give you a quick rundown on the ones I have running right now.
Konfabulator comes with a few pre-installed widgits, all which are very useful. They are: an Analog Clock, Battery indicator, Calendar, CPU Meter, iTunes Remote, Picture Frame, Reminder List, Stock Ticker, Weather Indicator, Waste Basket, Moon Phase Indicator, and WiFi Signal Indicator.
The weather indicator is gorgeous, as are nearly all the widgets, and can give compact current weather info, or a 4 day forcast along with current weather. I’d reccomend downloading Konfabulator even if this was the only widget for it (there are actually hundreds upon hundreds).
The CPU indicator shows both the percentages used by the user’s apps, and the system, with the total via digital display.
“What To Do”, the reminder list, is compact, very useful (with priority settings for each item) and as usual, very pretty.
The real wealth of utilities lies in the gallery (linked above):
TV Scraper 1.4 downloads a local channel guide, which you can then tell what channels to display (via tv.yahoo.com). It shows you whats on, and can scroll forward up to three hours ahead. I love it!
In lieu of the iTunes Remote, or the sexier mini iTunes Remote, I use Sputnik. Sputnik retrieves album art from Amazon.com in real-time as songs play in iTunes. You can specify a jewel-case color or choose none for just the picture itself. Mousing over the lower part of the picture displays title, artist and album, and mousing over the top reveals back, play/pause, and forward buttons.
mini CPU is a slightly smaller version of the CPU Portal Widget. It matches other widgets better, and shows user/system usage in a more compact way.
To expand my vocabulary I have Word of the Day. This is a tiny widget that simply dispays a word and its definition, from the word of the day from either wordsmith.org or dictionary.com.
There are many rss feed viewing widgets. The one I like is Kontent. Its minimalistic, skinned, has presets as well as allowing custom sites, and is tabbed. Whether its browsing, IM, etc, everybody loves tabs. This one has em, and slots for lots of sites, or just a couple if thats all you wish. If you don’t like Kontent, here are a bunch more.
I have one last widgit for Jalbey. Its called FlightTracker. Its a real-time flight monitoring widget providing flight departure and arrival information “for all commercial flights within, originating or terminating in North America”.
Read more about Konfabulator at http://www.konfabulator.com/info
Doody and one other person are discussing.
Doody 4:17 am on 12/4/2004 Permalink
You are gonna have to fill me in here. I am illiterate and have no idea what a widget is. I feel dumb.
Jalbey 5:02 pm on 12/4/2004 Permalink
Basicaly it is a small program (plug-in) for whatever you want it to be. It can display anything dynamicaly (based on user settings, program settings, or a data stream from the internet). Or in other words it is an awesome little thing that sits on your desktop and does cool things with cool graphics ;). The true meaning “An object on a Panther (Mac OSX) screen. Some widgets are used to interact with an application, while others are for display only.”
Euicho 5:28 pm on 12/4/2004 Permalink
thanks for takin that one jalb, and very well said (^_^) !
look here to see my desktop and some widgets I have (tv scraper, weather, what to do, etc.) Everything on the extreme right of the screen, in that whole column from the “Fark” viewer to the date/time box, is a widget, though you can place them anywhere you want.
Doody 6:37 am on 12/5/2004 Permalink
Cool, they sound and look kinda interesting. Do I have to download the Konfabulator first?
Euicho 6:11 pm on 12/5/2004 Permalink
yep you just download it, it comes with some already, and you can d/l more if you want.
KevinMichael Hamm 12:55 am on 12/9/2004 Permalink
Well, I’ll just give you the bits you missed. Yes, the idea is good, it’s the implementation that sucks. Most widgets, and in the case of what I installed, all widgets, had memory leaks. Not small memory leaks, but HUGE memory leaks. And the widgets weren’t like the system clock, taking up nothing for processor time, they were full-fledged programs, in some cases taking up more memory while taking up only slightly less desktop space. So on a mac, where you can command-h everything and hide them, and they didn’t add enough functionality to justify the cut to my processor speed. Especially on the poor G5 as it renders out 24 hours of video (notporn)… But, of course, Tiger is coming, and the widgets in Tiger are run by Dashboard, so rather than a huge and buggy java engine that takes up more space, the OS will be able to do the work in its background. Oh, and they will be built on web standards, so basically you get a full-transparency layer the size you choose (up to the screen real estate) that you can manipulate in fantastic ways. CSS and XHTML will work for them, you don’t have to do any java programming or javascripting. That’ll be good.