Konfabulator (aka Yahoo Widgets)

Posted by james on Feb. 25, 2006

I loved OSX's Dashboard. From playing with Lauren's PowerBook, it's the one thing I wished I could take back to Windows. And now I can! Yahoo Widgets is pretty much the same thing.

Fun little pretty "widgets" like a world clock, a random picture viewer, a calendar that stays on your desktop, local weather. Simpler than downloading a bunch of separate utilities (each with their own interface and quality).

Good things; lots of widgets, so you'll probably find something interesting. Plus, lots of attention to small details, like the preferences windows for each widget (awesome). The whole thing is very nice looking and also very simple. You just download a widget and double click, bang it appears on your desktop (no install, neat). And the best part, it's a platform for anyone to make their own... freedom!

Bad things (here we go); some widgets are very cavalier with memory usage (10mb for some), and each widget runs in it's own process (so that's 10mb x each widget for the bigger ones). They try to cram every available option into a context menu for the system tray icon instead of using a more traditional preferences window, or even a control panel (which would fit their theme and be so much nicer). Awkward. A lot of the widgets are very simple to the point of being only marginally useful (an awesome day planner... that only shows 1 day at a time? A calendar that doesn't sync with the day planner? A todo list you can't sort?). Their list of widgets to browse through is only moderately sorted into large categories. No ratings (what's the most popular?) so basically you're going through lists of 100-200 widgets looking for some that may be interesting. Tedious.

So sad, such a great idea. I'd be tempted to dump Rainlendar and go with widgets instead, but I haven't found what I need yet. I'll give it some more time, but I'm not hopeful that I'll find exactly what I want.

Last note; it used to be called Konfabulator. What a great "mad scientist" kind of name, easy to remember and spell, very unique. Now it's "Yahoo Widgets". How boring and typical, while at the same time further poluting and diluting the definition of "widget". Yuck. It's another 5.0ism.