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Now that Yahoo owns them and I have Mac envy in the fourth degree, I decided to give Yahoo! Widgets née Konfabulator another run through.

There is a very, very cool intro wizard after you install. By default it enables five widgets:

• battery and wireless signal strength monitors
• weather and analog clock
• a rotating picture frame

The picture frame is neat: it can display not only pictures in a folder on your disk, but also use Flickr API to get pictures live off the net. You get a big choice of streams to stream: yours, your favorites, all your contacts', an individual contact's, or everyone's pictures. I set mine to show all my contacts, and switch to a new picture every five minutes. (From the perspective of Yahoo acquiring Konfabulator to make data widgets for all their services: great so far!)

The wireless signal strength monitor looks pretty cool. The battery one, not so much, and I already have that shown in the taskbar notification area anyway. The weather widget looks nice, if a bit more ornate than the Dashboard one; I think I prefer Konfabulator's. I would like Dashboard's clock though.

One big problem I had with Konfabulator last time is still a problem: screen space. Right now I'm sitting on a couch, hacking on my work laptop. I have 1024 × 768 pixels to allocate, and there's simply not enough room to show everything I have open plus a lot of cool ambient media devices. It was hard enough to have space for Rainlendar--I've already become addicted to 3/4-screen-wide browsing--so adding more widgets to display doesn't help. I think I'll try leaving Trillian minimized, as I have pop-up notification of sign-ons and -offs anyway. (Maybe I could even make a Trillian plugin to expose its data to Konfabulator widgets... eh, I don't have a C++ compiler on me.)

In the same vein, the calendar widget is way too big, especially compared with my current calendar widget, Rainlendar (as recommended by Matt Haughey). Rainlendar has its own skins so it can be even smaller than pictured below. Rainlendar also integrates with Outlook, so it knows about all my meetings and reminds me (albeit with a very ugly popup in the skin I'm using) without having to keep Outlook open. I would prefer even Dashboard's calendar widget to Yahoo Widgets', if it synchronized with my appointment book.

If you have to hide the widgets, Konsposé is great to access hidden widgets, but hiding doesn't go well with ambient data display. (I would love some more ambient widget to replace The Bat!'s new mail ticker.) The one widget I'd like to expose out from under windows--Rainlendar, whenever I need to remember what dates are next week or whatever--isn't a real Widget, so I end up still abusing the Date/Time control panel occasionally.

However, Nick just pointed out something mentioned in the post-install wizard that I didn't grasp: you can set a widget "floating" and not only will it stay on top, but you can click through it to the app underneath! For now I have the wifi signal widget floating in the corner of the browser window. That's cool, but I'm not sure how well that will work in practice.

I would like to round out this review with some cool (or at least find some to use), but browsing [the widget gallery][gallery], they seem to have both a real long tail of utility and skin disease. Out of 646 I found maybe 20 worth looking at details for, 10 worth downloading, and 5 I'd like to use.

But boy they look cool!

July 29, 2005 1:50 PM 4 comments