Konfabulator Fuss?

July 25, 2005 5:34 PM

The sites that I frequent have been abuzz with the news that Konfabulator has been purchased by Yahoo. Having since downloaded Konfabulator, I must ask: What's the big deal?

Seriously, I don't get it. I install it on my XP box, and it puts things on my screen when I hit F8 (and blocks everything else out).

I've used Litestep, Windowblinds, Y'z Dock, theme dll hacks, and so on -- but this program, I don't get. What am I missing?

posted by Jairus to computers & internet (12 comments total)

It mimics the Dashboard functionality of the latest OS X. (Or, rather, Apple implemented Dashboard after Konfabulator, although the provenance is in some dispute.)

I gather the thinking is that Konfabulator will help Yahoo! integrate more closely with the Desktop and offer more essential net tools, like GoogleMaps or gmail.
posted by docgonzo at 5:37 PM on July 25, 2005

There's plenty of talk about the useful widgets in this morning's MetaFilter thread. Many people asked the same question you posted here and got answers.

I personally have the widgets showing on my desktop all the time, so I can glance around the edges of the screen and see the weather / date / my todo list.
posted by mathowie at 5:46 PM on July 25, 2005

Here's the thing: the F8 functionality is one of the newer things in the app. The standard mode is to have the windows pinned to the desktop, so you can see them at any time. "That makes no sense," you protest. "My full screen windows hide the widgets and I must hit F8 to see them." Well, this is a Mac program first. It only came out for Windows in November; it gained its fame elsewhere. On a Mac, you barely ever have maximized full-screen windows, and you can almost always see your desktop. So a program like this is much more practical.

Plus the widgets are pretty.
posted by smackfu at 5:53 PM on July 25, 2005

I have the Konfabulator widgets on all the time, too -- the to-do list, the weather, the super awesome TV scraper, the calendar, and a few other little things. They're pretty, they're functional, and they're really cool. I don't know; I fell in love with it last year and am really glad for today's news and the folks at K.
posted by youarejustalittleant at 5:56 PM on July 25, 2005

On Windows, it seems like your best two options are:

1. Keep all your widgets on "low" window layer so they stay on the desktop and behind your software. Make the windows background a solid color and use the widgets like an "active" background.

2. Put all the Windows on "show on F8 only" and make it a sort of autohiding control panel.

While both of these are pretty neat, it eats a fair amount of memory. And since I have Firefox open most all of the time I'm on the computer it seems more efficient to use Firefox extensions for things like weather reporting, mail checking and RSS feeds.
posted by selfnoise at 6:13 PM on July 25, 2005

Look what I did with Konfabulator after downloading it 4 hours ago.

Looks pretty useful.
posted by Mach5 at 9:52 PM on July 25, 2005

There's nothing really all that special about it. Other than putting a bunch of informational crap in one place, it's the same functionality you'd find with any random informational app that would sit in your system tray. And it looks 'pretty'.

I actually removed that stupid Dashboard icon from my dock on my ibook, and would rather remove it completely from my system, but apparently it's pretty tied into Tiger.

Summary: It's mostly hype, and just another way of doing things that have already been done, with resource-eating eyecandy.
posted by angry modem at 10:44 PM on July 25, 2005

angry modem: don't know if you've discovered this already, but you can turn off the F12 dashboard shortcut by going to "System Preferences" > "Keyboard Shortcuts" > "Dock, Exposé, and Dashboard", then unclick the "Dashboard" checkbox.
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:57 PM on July 25, 2005

I hate dashboard, but I've used konfabulator for a long time on my desktop. I have a very large display, so i throw a few little widgets down one of the edges.

On my laptops however, I find it both konfabulator and dashboard to be useless... too many wasted pixels.
posted by mosch at 12:20 AM on July 26, 2005

So I think the key here is "ambient information." You'd like to have stuff like weather, new emails, your currently playing song, etc. easily accessible, but not taking up space on your desktop, or running a bunch of diverse programs that sit in your system tray. You hit F8, your widgets slide in, you look at what you needed to look at, and then you slide it out and go back to work, without worrying about opening and closing more programs.

I'll try a metaphor:
You're working on something at your desk, and if you want to know what time it is or what day it is, you turn your head and look at the calendar and clock on your wall, and then look back at your work. You don't go through your file cabinet looking for a calendar. Using Konspose (the F8 thing), or Apple's Dashboard, is like turning your head.
posted by patgas at 7:28 AM on July 26, 2005

"K" 2.1 is free now, give it a try (if you bought 2.0 you are probably eligible for a refund.
posted by leafwoman at 7:36 AM on July 26, 2005

i think a lot of it is that many people, who typically don't program every day, get to to make something themselves that gives a large amount of "reward" (nice looking visuals) for the effort. so you get to fiddle with your computer and produce something pretty - which is basically the pleasure of programming, right? - but without the huge investment that "real programming" takes. it doesn't matter whether what it produces is useful (if you want to know the weather look out the window already) any more than it matters to me whether the company i'm working for is a commercial success - all i care about is getting to write cool code.

similarly, if you have a more sophisticated - for want of a better characterisation - visual taste you can make anything beautiful. but for most people shiny flashing bought stuff is what they make do with for beautiful, and this gives you shiny flashing stuff on your desktop.

and it provides easy, ready packaged access to information to people who find google tricky (and look at the questions here to see how many people are like that).

does that make sense? it's a kind of easy access to creating stuff that looks reasonably good. the programming/visual/search equivalent of high sugar food.

this explanation will only make sense if you program computers already in some way (in a very general sense - perhaps a web developer), but my guess is that it's people like this who don't "get" it (i certainly don't "get it", apart from this guess).

yes, i'm aware this is hugely reactionary. no doubt people are saying that this is a paradigm shift that will do away with tedious people like me.
posted by andrew cooke at 8:14 AM on July 26, 2005