Konfabulator

Wednesday 10 November 2004 — This is 20 years old. Be careful.

Konfabulator is a cross-platform desktop widget system. It started on Mac OS X, but has recently been ported to Windows. Widgets are written as zip files containing XML, JavaScript, and images, and they can run on either operating system. The widgets themselves look gorgeous, due to their Mac heritage.

I was going to include a screen-shot of some tasty widgets on my desktop, but they are vampires: they don’t appear in magnifiers or screen captures. Perhaps it’s due to their transparency?

Comments

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Bob 9:33 AM on 10 Nov 2004
Konfabulator widgets show up for me when I take a screen capture and the opacity looks right. I wonder if it's a display driver thing.
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Michael Wexler 11:02 AM on 10 Nov 2004
Turn off driver acceleration in the display control panel and many screen shots come across fine. I had a similar problem with Windows Media Player...
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Julien Couvreur 1:04 PM on 10 Nov 2004
Tried DesktopX last week and Konfabulator (for windows) today (your post convinced me to try it). I was disappointed by both, maybe I just don't "get it" yet.
I like the hot key to switch mode thing, but not as much the widgets on the desktop part. Multi-workspace desktop (afterstep and most other linux desktop managers do it) did that for me already...

The XML+javascript for Konfabulator is definitely a cool factor. But it looks like extending the object model with native OS functionality is a pain: http://www.furrygoat.com/PermaLink.aspx?guid=d3513213-4209-4be7-aedb-1b05009f07fb

I'm curious to see if some killer widgets will appear, that are not the re-hashed clock, newsticker and RSS headlines ;-)
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Zib Redlektab 3:27 PM on 10 Nov 2004
if u use the default magnifyer for windows found in the system 32 folder, some will show themselves.

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