Konfabulator: Whatever You Want It To Be

Squidgee writes "Arlo Rose, one of the developers who worked on Kaleidoscope, and the ill fated Eazel desktop environment for Linux, has come out with another potentially Mac-shaking app: Konfabulator. Konfabulator lets you run any program written in XML/Applescript/Javascript (It's own little hybrid of all three) in its engine, seamlessly placing the app onto your desktop. Examples of such apps are: A CPU Monitor, a Multi-Clipboard tool, a weather monitor, a battery monitor, etc. It allows for easy developement, beautiful apps, and unlimited functionality."

Comments

Exactly!

[SensitiveMale]

I can save most people the trouble of checking out the site.

1/2 the widgets are clocks.

1/3 of the widgets are newsreaders.

The rest are silly widgets that do nothing but take up space.

All of them are HUGE and take up tons of desktop space.

If you want to check their forums, I can save you that trouble also. 1/2 the posts are people having orgasms over the product and 1/3 of the people are complaining about the price.

Right now the widgets don't do anything that menu items or docklets do much better.

Haven't I seen this somewhere before?

[GoRK]

Woo. Active Desktop comes to the Mac about four years after everyone decided it was pretty much useless. Oh well, I guess some people will really like to fool with it and say how great and superior it is to active desktop even though it is the same exact fucking thing. I made lots of little Active Desktop widgets at one point that are now lost to the annals of time I suppose. It was fun while it lasted.

~GoRK

Re:what could it be used for?

[tamen]

I spent an hour making a remote for XMMS running in X11. Most of the time was spent en Photoshop doing the GUI, wich now sits nice an quiet and unobtrusive in the topright corner, half translucent and floating over my other windows.
As it is now, I can quickly convert the widget to, say, control iTunes on another box on my network, or iTunes on my own box. And I think that most other apps that can be controlled via either Applescript or the terminal can be controlled with a widget.

I dont knwo about you, but Ive always wanted a more simpel remote formy television and stereo. Now I can at least get simple remotes for most of my apps.
Oh, and most of my websites too ;)

A cross platform operations tool?

[dmorin]

I'll tell you why this sounds interesting to me. We're in the middle of a massive hardware project at work that is going to multiply the number of servers by something like 16. The operations guys are going bananas trying to get their heads around it. The most useful tools to them right now are things that make monitoring, resetting, alerts and other "simple" operations like that easier. WITHOUT programming, if they can help it. Building their own tools easily slips into the development realm, and they're less likely to get significant resources approved to do that.

So if this tool allows them to easily whip up things like server or load monitors, then it's a good thing. Of course, we don't use Macs though :), which is why the title of my post is what it is. I'm going to take a quick skim through the site and see if there's any potential (stated or implied) that says that the engine could be ported to traditional Xwindow, which would make it the most generic for them.