Home & Small Office Computer Guide

I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who have heard about Konfabulator and their widgets before. If you’re one of those people then I guess that you’ll just have to humour me because I only found out about them on Friday.

Konfabulator popped into someone’s brain back in 1998 when that person thought it would be cool to have a skinnable MP3 player. From there it was only a short step to thinking about skinning any information you wanted to see on your desktop and that is how Konfabulator came about.

Kofabulator is a fairly quick download and an easy set up and once you have it you can then go to their site for the widgets that you think you will need. A widget is a simple script that can display information on your desktop.

There are currently over 1300 widgets to choose from and they include games, dates and times, news feeds, systems utilities, webcams from around the world and a lot of other stuff too. There are even several widgets for cricket scores.

Downloading the widgets is pretty simple too and most of them are self-installing. Once they are on your machine you can have them running on your desktop continuously. They consume little in the way of resources and disappear into the background when you’re working.

At the moment, because the novelty hasn’t worn off yet I’m running six widgets on one of my screens. There are

a couple of system utilities

an analog clock

an interesting little widget that shows which parts of the world are in darkeness (that might sound useless to lots of people but we work constantly with clients all round the world so it helps to know when they’re asleep)

a picture frame that cycles through any image directory I might point it to

a headline reader that shows me the latest offerings on slashdot.com

I think it’s a great idea and most people will find something useful in amongst all those widgets. Yahoo thought it was such a great idea that they bought the company.

It seems that a huge proportion of people online use at least one of the three major Instant Messaging systems. And if you’re in a business that focuses on the online market place then you probably find that you need to have two and possibly all three of those systems running on your desktop.

That can be a pain if people on all three networks start talking to you at the same time and it gets even worse if there are a lot of people talking to you at the same time.

If that’s the case then a joint announcement by Mirosoft and Yahoo could be very good news for you. Starting some time after March next year people will be able to combine their buddy lists in MSN and Yahoo