What is a widget? (Konfabulator)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Konfabulator
Date:	12/12/05 (1053 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some useful widgets, can bring information to your desktop.

Disadvantages: Finding a useful widget may prove difficult. American focussed.

Widgets are small pieces of software that offer some sort of limited (but sometimes useful) functionality. They're typically coded using HTML (hypertext mark-up language) with CSS (cascading style sheets) and JavaScript.

If you're an Apple Mac owner, chances are this is all familiar to you and there are rumours that widgets could appear in the next version of Windows. Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) includes a widget system accessed through the Dashboard. However, Windows users have no such system. Step forward Konfabulator (recently renamed as "YAHOO Widget Engine" (http://www.konfabulator.com/ or http://widgets.yahoo.com/) which is a system designed to act as a control panel and driving engine for widgets. Konfabulator has been around for quite a few years now, but has recently been taken over by YAHOO and is available for both Windows and Mac OS users. YAHOO have just released version 3 of the widget engine.

Once the download is completed (just under 10Mb for the Windows version), the installation is fast and easy. The installation includes a few widgets to get you started, but if you want to have a look at what's on offer, you can access other widgets through the Konfabulator website or by pointing your browser at: http://www.widgetgallery.com. At the time of writing, there are around 1500 widgets available for Windows users. These tend to be fairly small in size with the majority of the widgets I've downloaded being under 200kb in size. On your PC, the widgets are stored within your 'My documents' folder in, unsurprisingly, 'My Widgets'.

You can access your widgets onscreen via two methods. The first is the invisible layer that exists on which your widgets exist. This is completely transparent and you'd be forgiven for thinking that they're on your desktop, but click on your 'Show Desktop' icon on the Quick Launch toolbar and you'll soon see that they're not (you can see the widgets by manually minimising all your open programs, but that's not immediately obvious). The other is to access YAHOO's "heads up display" which gives your widgets their own desktop although I didn't find this method particularly helpful.

How useful or interested you're going to be with Konfabulator (I still can't get used to calling it the YAHOO Widget Engine) will depend entirely on whether you find a widget that's useful or interesting to you. I only really use around four or five widgets regularly, though I do pop back to the Gallery every so often to see what's new. Not all widgets are designed to be 'useful' though. Some are there just for fun, like the 'Stewie Griffin' widget that displays a picture of the Family Guy character and will play a limited selection of random Stewie quotes. For those of you who are fans of 'Lost' and have been enjoying Season 2, then there's a widget that lets you replicate the "fun" with the numbers every 108 minutes, but does nothing more than that.

Where widgets seem to be most popular is either by "skinning" an already existing application (e.g. a small remote control for iTunes) or providing easy access to information on the web. You'll notice a lot of widgets for things like webcam viewers of specific cities, sports listings (typically American, though), RSS feeds from specific sites etc. It can be a bit hit and miss whether you'll find something you like. I have the five day weather forecast in use all the time and I think it's excellent (although it's one of the bundled widgets with Konfabulator) and every now and again I'll run the RSS feed from a Liverpool FC related site, amongst others.

With Konfabulator being owned by YAHOO, there are obviously links to YAHOO. The weather widget I previously referred to is a YAHOO widget and is updated regularly and is quite accurate. You can also get widgets to check your YAHOO email account, YAHOO search etc. I would expect these to be added to and updated regularly.

There are games available, too. They're not hugely complicated, but still fun (and are a change from Microsoft's offerings which I'm sick of by now). I've played 'Pipes', 'Mastermind' and 'Sodoku' and these are a nice distraction from time to time.

Most of the widgets available are compatible with both Windows and Mac Os systems.

I really like the idea of widgets as they provide some excellent functionality for all sorts of things although they don't really offer anything that you couldn't do yourself. It's nice to have the information at the click of a mouse button or, if you set your preferences correctly, when your PC starts up, rather than a 5 minute web search. As a UK user, I'd prefer it if there were a few more UK-related widgets out there (the majority seem to be American-based) and that the useful ones were a bit easier to find (although the widget gallery site is at least categorised). Even though I only use a small amount of widgets, I do use them often enough to be able to justify having Konfabulator on my PC and the system is currently free to use.

I'd recommend Konfabulator if you can find a few widgets that you'd use. If you can't, then the system is ultimately useless.

System Requirements:
• Windows XP with Service Pack 1 installed or Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 or later installed (Mac OS X 10.3 or newer).
• A connection to the Internet.

Summary: A system for adding lots of useful little programs (typically web-based).

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