I love widgets, and if you're a PC user, there's really no other choice but konfabulator. This isn't a bad thing, especially since konfabulator is now FREE (thank you, Yahoo!). Don't even bother with the imitators (avedesk, kapsules, etc.) unless you're really ready to geek and tweak, and crash. However, things are very different in the Mac world. Konfabulator's been available on the Mac platform forever (and is now free for Mac-heads as well), but with the entry of OS X Tiger and dashboard, there's been some viable competition. Both dashboard and konfabulator offer beautiful, mostly free widgets that are almost always user-created; both allow you to customize your desktop with whatever additional info/tools you find handy: weather, media, lists, contacts, system info, etc., etc. The only real difference I found was that dashboard widgets seem to have more internal functionality. For example, if I use a dictionary or wikipedia widget in dashboard it comes with its own viewer that functions within the dashboard widget itself. The same type of widget in konfabulator looks beautiful, but when I enter a query item, it opens an internet browser window in my default browser--not so pretty.
So, I gave up on konfabulator for my Mac, that is until I went a-speed-tweaking. As I searched for ways to reduce my CPU load (I am, after all, trying to live on a 1.33 GHz PPC chip in my iBook until 2006...don't get me started), I decided to turn dashboard off. No other change I've been able to make to my system has made such a singular difference. Even after I had reduced the total number of widgets I was using, dashboard was hogging upwards of 40-50% of my CPU cycles. How rude! So, it's been back to konfabulator and free-CPU-cycle heaven.
Remember, friends don't let friends dashboard and compute.
- Hutch
