Konfabulator / Yahoo Widgets for your desktop

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!