Widgets. They're Everywhere!
excerpts from
this articleI've got Widgets all over my desktop. Click here to see what I mean.
Widgets are just the cat's pajamas! If you looked at my screen capture and wondered where the nifty calendar in the lower left corner came from, or the weather report, or adorable Gir from Invader Zim--well, they're all Widgets.
Last night I was trying to explain Konfabulator and the concept of Widgets to my cousin who phoned from Raleigh. She's as much a Mac head as I am and tends to become excited over new applications, like I do--but it was difficult for me to explain Widgets. Language like "javascript runtime engine" just didn't seem applicable for things so ingenious and small and sometimes impractical.
Widgets. Where had she heard that word before? Oh yeah! Macroeconomics class! I remembered that too, and we laughed. In Economics, while studying a semester long imaginary business from its conception to its final days, Widgets were those imaginary products the company manufactured.
A Widget was almost magical in nature; a philosopher's stone among tools. A Widget could do anything its holder wanted it to do, basically. Leave it to my cousin to remember that, and to finish the description I couldn't bring myself to masterfully render of what a Widget is.
Widgets are the little programs that run under Konfabulator, and they do almost anything you can imagine. They're fun, plentiful (there are nearly 200 different ones available at the time of this writing), and addictive. My own Widgets folder is growing at an alarming rate and becoming less manageable with each passing day.
Thank goodness there's even a Widget to manage your Widgets.Widgets are small and don't require a lot of system resoures to run, so you can have several of them running on your desktop at once. I have about 5 running right now, including The Weather, What To Do, LiveJournal Friends, Kontent, and Full Screen Clock (whick displays the time with suave transparency against my desktop picture, even showing through my open program windows so I always know what time it is--without having to look to the upper right corner of my iBook's display, where the time has always been anyway.
Well, it's more fun!
Widgets also look very good as decorations to my otherwise bland desktop. They add depth and dimension to a nice solid color or minimalist desktop picture, blending in with the background rather than running in windows that must be minimized and restored.
I realize as I bring this article to a close, I may have failed yet again in trying to describe what Konfabulator does, or what Widgets are. The best way to find out is to visit the site and download a copy, round up some Widgets of your own, and feel what I mean.
Melonie Jackson
