Konfabulator is great!
Saturday, July 16, 2005
I have spent the evening looking for a method of skinning iTunes for windows XP, I'm fed up of the grey scheme and would like the library to take more advantage of the cover art each of my music files has. I really wanted to browse by artist and beneath the artist there would be the album title and cover and to the right a tracklisting / track details. This is what I want for iTunes and I haven't yet found it. However, on my trek across the internet I stumbled upon Konfabulator 2, the stylish, simple and effective widget machine:
What Is Konfabulator?
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.
What sets Konfabulator apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of today's advanced graphics. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home in Windows XP and Mac OS X.
I decided to install and experiment. Previously I have used rainmeter and samurize clients to display information on my desktop. Such clients have been slightly annoying to position, congifure and match with my current theme. Konfab' comes with several preconfigured widgets for you to use; an analogue clock, CPU monitor, Wifi signal monitor, weather forecasts and various others. I used to have a weather add-on for Rainmeter yet the advanced configuration and work to find the local forecast code number was not worth the hassle of the forecast only showing every 3 reboots. So I tried this aspect first, I entered my home town and country and there it was, the forecast in all it's simple and brilliant glory, directly to my desktop. It also shows the current stage of the moon's cycle and puts temperatures in a METRIC format. Next up, time to browse the third-party widgets (http://www.widgetgallery.com/).
Here I found an iTunes remote that looks like an empty cd jewel case. Upon playing it shows the album cover in the ID3 tag, if not tag exists the widget searches Amazon for an appropriate cover. Upon rolling over the top half a set of controls to change track, etc... appear, rolling over the bottom half brings up the progress bar, track name and artist name. Simple and eloquent. It also has some advanced features such as hiding itself when iTunes is closed, bringing itself to the front upon track change and hotkeys for control. It also has three spearate sizes for album covers, in the screenshot below it's on the middle setting. So here's an image of my current desktop, click for larger.
Labels: Technical
Posted by FofR
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