Solo Technology

I mentioned a month ago that Yahoo! had taken over Konfabulator and changed the name to the Yahoo! Widget engine. This is a great example of fun technology. There are many many widgets out there that can do many many different things.

An interesting note: Yahoo! has their own Widget Gallery now. There is also the old Widget Gallery still in existence. I’m not sure if they’re the same or not… I know at one point I couldn’t find the Google related widgets at Yahoo!’s gallery, but that no longer seems to be the case.

One of my favorite widgets is systemBlox. I run a few of these over on the right side of my screen. One for WiFi signal strength, one for CPU Usage, one for Physical Memory usage and the final one for Virtual Memory usage. The rolling dial effect is quite nice and they’re tolerably easy on the system resources too.

Recently, an XM Tuner widget came out as well. This thing is great! I love my XMradio, but I hated their web interface to stream audio. Clunky and always timing me out if I didn’t move the mouse over it once in a while. This thing does everything it did, and more. Uses less resources and far less screen real estate too. Great addition.

The neat thing about the widgets is you can have tons of ‘em. You don’t need to run them all the time either. Just open up what you want, when you need it if it is “specialized”. Heck, I even use a widget that helps me search thottbot for quests when playing World of Warcraft…. but I sure don’t have it going all day at work.

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