Peter's Blog

New Konfabulator widget to recommend: Nasa Image Gallery.

It comes up with the most amazing images.

New version of Konfabulator out today. They've fixed a bug where the weather display always showed the moon, which did puzzle me at a background level. Today there is a nice big sun:

The sun/cloud patterns change every hour or so, according to the weather, which is cool when there are no windows where you are sitting.

Bit chilly for August.

Konfabulator is looking good. The weather widget seems to get updated every few hours and told me I could drive home lunchtime and cycle back to work in the afternoon without risking rain. The various clocks all seem to consume about 3% cpu time with the second hand enabled which goes down to less than 1% without the second hand.

Servant Salamander is becoming more useful every day. I don't miss the trees in explorer, it makes a good sftp client, the Hot Paths are very handy, two pane mode is so good for copying files, it's fast, it hasn't crashed while networking (yet), generally it's looking good.

Konfabulator has been bought by Yahoo and they are giving it away for free. So what? Well Konfabulator is a utility that allows you to put Widgets on your desktop. This can be something like:

• Clock
• CPU Meter
• Weather forcast (tip: "Location = London,UK" seems to work)
• Random pictures from your hard disk or Flickr account

It all looks very internet aware, many of the Widgets have some form of connection to the net. This is why Yahoo bought it (like they bought Flickr).

You can write your own widgets in javascript.

It's a lot like Desktop X but the CPU loading looks more reasonable: many processes, one per widget maybe, but only one of them is at 1% cpu (Pentium 2 450M). And unlike Desktop X it is free.