Coty's Radio Weblog

	Monday, February 10, 2003

Konfabulator is an OS X control-panel for desktop ...

Konfabulator is an OS X control-panel for desktop widgets, web-services and a lot of other junk, besides, with a beautiful UI. It's like Watson or Sherlock, but it's free and it's got a wide-open API so developers can add their own widgets to the panel. I've only played with it for five minutes, but I'm hooked. I wish there was a way to float the widgets in the foreground, set their transparency and resize them, though... Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)

7:16 AM | Cory Doctorow

[Forwarding Address: OS X]

Well, there is a way to float widgets in the foreground. You just need to go into the .kon resource for the widget and add the following entry in the <window> stanza:

<level>topMost</level>

As these widgets are built on top of a JavaScript engine and include their source and various resources right in their bundle, I think they should be eminently customizable. I hope a future release will have a UI for editing these ubiquitous widget window properties and other properties like them, but for now I have to say that Konfabulator is pretty darn cool, if for no other reason than because all its widgets are so pretty.

This is very reminiscent of Sherlock in its use of JavaScript as a foundation. I'm looking forward to hacking around in it. I'd like to determine what JavaScript engine it is using, etc. It would be great if, in the long run, if Apple could make JavaScriptCore a foundation for Konfabulator, Sherlock, and other tools of their ilk.
comment [] trackback [] 5:58:59 PM