Nifty little desktop widgets that put information at your fingertips, and look pretty to boot.
Apple users have had the Dashboard for a while, the idea for which came from a small California company called Konfabulator. Windows in its next version, Longhorn, will be experimenting with a “Sidebar” feature, which looks remarkably less attractive in its beta avatars [screenshots].
The idea: provide widgets or cool capsules of functionality on your desktop, stock tips, visual weather info about cities of interest, CPU consumption rates, calculator, alarm, calendar, a quick access to your Events and To-Do lists, and so forth.
Konfabulator has been available on Windows since nearly November last year as a simple little Javascript install, with a miniscule memory footprint that installs widgets like this on the desktop:
But it used to be US$ 25 bucks a pop. What’s new is Yahoo’s recent acquisition of the 3-person company. Looks like Yahoo is quite keen on making it big, which is why “Yahoo Widgets” now come scotfree.
It’s up for download here. The install sets up some basic widgets, but there’s a whole bunch more to sift through in the Widget Gallery here.
Worth a shot!
Yahoo is doing good. But for the record the idea for this desktop widgetry did not come from Apple or Konfabulator. MS had this in the form of ‘Active Desktop’ long before from its Win 98 days. Apple merely executed it better. Story of almost every other cool ‘invention’ from Apple.