Yahoo! Buys Konfabulator, a Combination That Makes Sense - Konfabulating
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Let’s take a quick look at Konfabulator in action, which will then help to show how great combining these two companies will be.
Konfabulator basically runs little widgets that do whatever you want them to. They can monitor your computer resources or provide small applications, novelties, and games. When Konfabulator really shows its potential is when t uses these little programs to glean important information from the internet and leave it a click away for you.
While you may wonder how much use these toys are if they site on your desktop behind your open windows, consider that all the widgets can be pulled into visibility with one keystroke. By default, F8 makes all the tools pop up from behind, making all the information available in one click. They also stay in front of your other work until signaled to sink back. This is far faster than bothering to type a request into Google, even if you are at google.com with the cursor in the search field.
These few basic widgets monitoring the resources my computer is using. From left to right, the first is a clock. There are many styled clocks available. Yes, there is one sitting in my system tray too; this one just looks cooler. Next is the memory monitor, which is watching my RAM usage, virtual memory, and hard drive space respectively. There are more things you can add to this one. Last is the Uptime Monitor, telling me my computer has been on for 8 days and 8 hours.
There are other “system watchers” that keep an eye on everything from charting your processor usage, to watching your laptop’s battery strength, to the speed of your WiFi connection. These are just a very small sample.
Looks warm and sunny outside
This is my favorite web widget, and it gives you an idea of what the thing does. I like seeing a several-day forecast quickly, which this program keeps updating itself on every minute after I tell it my zip code. In the time I typed this, my bright sunny icon in the screenshot turned to a dark, evil cloud.
My main gripes right now are that the detailed Yahoo! weather page is three clicks away (and you have to minimize all windows to click the last link), and the page that comes up is nonspecific to you. Ideally, the Yahoo-bulator would store your Yahoo! ID and information, then provide a one click link to get more information on a customized page. I realize Yahoo! just acquired this toy though, so the company is probably working on these issues. I’ll be really interested to see greater Yahoo! integration.
Other web-scraping toys display information on traffic reports in busy cities (and traffic cameras), television schedules, RSS feed(s), recent lottery results, stock fluctuations, mosquito condition reports, the build process of the newest Alienware PC, and much more. The uses for pulling web information seem nearly endless.
And be warned: downloading new widgets can become an addiction.
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