Pocket Lint

Konfabulate Me!

July 27, 2005

A couple of days ago I heard the news that Yahoo had bought Konfabulator, a handy little bit of desktop software that allows you to use a wide variety of “widgets” on your computer. It sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a try—especially since Konfabulator, once $20, is now free as part of the Yahoo deal.

What on earth was I waiting for??

This app is just AWESOME and so amazingly useful because it isn’t really just one app. Think of Konfabulator as a a plug-in architecture that allows you to do almost anything you want with widgets, which are tiny little bits of code that do some very useful things. If you’re really clever, you can write your own widgets. If you’re not, or if you’re just way too busy to spend the time, you have over 300 to choose from, with more appearing on an almost daily basis.

I must admit that I went pretty nuts with my “collection” of widgets. By far my favorite is one that came with the original Konfabulator download, entitled What to Do. It’s a very simple “to do” list that really fits the way I work. Click once with a mouse and controls pop up on the list that allow you to delete a completed item, or click on the small plus sign at the bottom of the list to add a new item. Type in the text of the note and then choose a priority, ranging from highest to lowest, with five steps to choose from. Tasks are automatically sorted from high to low, with a subtle bit of color coding on the left edge. This one is my favorite because I’m hopeful that I can train myself to stop writing tasks on little pieces of paper that immediately get lost in the clutter on my desk. Not every task is “important” enough to make it to my LifeDrive, especially if it’s something that has to be done at work. With What to Do, I can still stay organized without feeling compelled to enter every little thing into Palm Desktop for fear of losing a little scrap of paper.

Widgets range from the silly to useful, and every stop in between. I can add a swimming goldfish to my desktop if I like, or one of several dancing anime characters. There are games of course, such as Battleship, Breakout clones, Rubik’s Cube, MahJongg clones, and the like. There are some fun widgets such as Daily Dose, that grabs up to three comic strips for you every day, or one that fetches the Braingle Brain Teaser of the day. Useful widgets do everything from provide news headlines and weather forecasts, stock tickers, clocks & desk calendars, track packages, watch eBay auctions, and monitor ALL of your email accounts (including Yahoo, HotMail, GMail, and POP3) for new messages and play a sound for each one when you get new messages.

Some of the widgets do a great job of “replacing” or more quickly accessing your web browser for simple tasks such as currency conversions, looking up Bible passages online, thesaurus and dictionary lookups, movie showtimes, etc. Just type in what you want, from a word to define or a term to search using Google, and the widget will either provide the answer or launch your browser to display the results, without having to type in a single URL. PIM Overview (which comes with Konfabulator) consolidates all the information from Outlook or iCal and presents it in a nice and tidy format. I really wish that it worked with Palm Desktop data to provide a “Today” view of all my upcoming appointments and tasks! Of particular interest to music lovers is the wide variety of iTunes plug-in widgets available, with everything from mini remote controls to apps that will find and download album cover art automatically.

Now that I’ve been “Konfabulated” I’m not going back to the old way of doing things. It’s just too handy to have all these little tools on the desktop, ready to go at a moment’s notice. They don’t take up much room, and you can place them anywhere you like. Daily Dose is front and center, right in the middle of the screen, and the news headlines from MSNBC, CNN, and the BBC are at the bottom of the screen. The weather forecast with at a glance graphics is at the bottom right, and my What to Do list takes up the entire left column of the screen. I’ve got a few other things floating here and there, and they’re all instantly accessible by pressing F8 to enter Konspose mode, which brings all of your widgets to the top and greys out the rest of your desktop, including any open app windows, icons, backgrounds/wallpaper, etc. It’s great for quick headline checks if you’re using several news feeds, for adding new notes, etc.

So what are you waiting for? Grab Konfabulator and the widgets that appeal to you at the Konfabulator web site. It’s incredibly fun and/or useful, depending on the widgets you get, and best of all, it’s FREE!

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