Jason Schwanz dot com

Konfabulous

Filed under Mac, Technology, Tools, Windows

Have you heard the big tech news of the day? Konfabulator was purchased by Yahoo! You may ask, what is this Konfabulator thing, and why do I need to use it? Well, here is the exact text from the Konfabulator web site:

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.

Users of MacOS 10.4 (the Tiger…grrrrr) don’t need to use this because Apple included a similar widget feature with that OS. But for the rest of us stuck in the Windows world (or the few pre-Tigers out there) this is a supercool tool with seemingly endless capabilities. These widgets tell you everything from how much battery life you have left on your laptop to the sports scores of the day. With a simple tap of the F8 key it brings forward all of the widgets and greys out the background.

So, Yahoo! purchased this company, and for what purpose you might ask…to better compete with Google of course. Y! will open up an API for use with Konfabulator and extend their data out to more people. I need to play around with it a little more, but I’m excited to try it out. There is a Gmail notification thing, plus various web search options, so I might not need to keep a web browser open all day anymore. Lots of possibilities, lots of cool toys to play with too