The Konfabulator tool was recommended to me by a coworker recently. He noticed that I used the Desktop Sidebar, a Longhorn-looking (Windows Vista) desktop component. To be honest, I was speculative of the Konfabulator’s ability to replace the Desktop Sidebar, both by its name and the source of information (he’s not a Windows guy, so I feared his aesthetics were maligned to mine). That said, I only took notice of this toy this morning when another coworker told me that Yahoo! had bought-out Konfabulator. I don’t particularly like Yahoo!, but they’re bolstering their reputation by purchasing really excellent start-up products (e.g. Flickr). Yahoo! talks a bit about the purchase on Konfabulator’s homepage for now – they point out the necessity for a name change, which I wholeheartedly agree with. The product is über-stylish with some Mac glamour adaptations and modular widgets. Not entirely dissimilar to the Desktop Sidebar, though the main concept behind the Konfabulator is zero-cohesion between modules. That is, the modules (okay, I’ll call them widgets now) come up as separate, floating objects on the desktop. You can click and position most of them with very little difficulty, and with two monitors it’s comforting to know that I can messy up both sides with arbitrary positioning. These types of software always come with the utilitarian aspects to them – system resource monitoring, weather reports, floating search boxes – as well as the fun stuff – Simpson’s quote-a-day, mosquito alert monitor, werewolf monitor, et al. So far, I’m really digging this new gadget. The SDK portion of things involves Photoshop layers and Javascript. It doesn’t get much easier than that! I’m interested in creating some needed widgets; some things that existed for the Desktop SIdebar but not for Konfabulator. Once I give it a shot, I’ll post a remark on that process. I never tried creating anything for the Desktop Sidebar (it seemed to have everything), so I can’t really compare. I can say that the Konfabulator looks a lot sweeter.
Cool. I tried Konfabulator before it was free. It used to turn to nagware in about 30 days or so and demand a paid registration. The binary clock widget was my favorite. That was several months ago, I may try it again now that it is freeware.