I was talking to Mom last night and she was mentioning her new eMac at the school. She said Matt was playing around on it and had really liked the Dashboard feature of Mac OS 10.4 (aka Tiger). Well, Dashboard was most likely born from a previous widget concept made popular by a program known as Konfabulator. I believe that Konfabulator used to be about $25. But it was recently bought by Yahoo and as a result is now free. It runs in Mac OS 10.2 or greater, Windows 2000, & Windows XP.
Konfabulator
Konfabulator ships with several useful widgets like Analog Clock, Calendar, and Weather. But here is a list of some other interesting/useful/fun widgets.
iPlayer
iTunes widget for Konfabulator based on iPod shuffle design.
Sing that iTune!
A lyric fetcher Widget for iTunes which can also handle radio streaming titles. The lyrics are saved in “Documents/Sing that iTune!” folder and you can also add your self-made lyrics in there. Sync the folder with iPod’s Notes folder to bring it.
NCAA Football liveSchedule
An updating desktop football schedule for NCAA division 1A schools. Schedule will update as game-times and scores become available.
mini iTunes Remote
The eighth Widget in the mini Widget series. mini iTunes Remote is a complete redesign and coding effort of the iTunes Remote that ships with Konfabulator. This version features a compact design, the ability to change your ratings, and and set your iChat status to your current playing track.
HAL9000
A novel Widget where HAL9000 periodically speaks.
Stack ‘Em!
A classic time waster is now available for Konfabulator! Can you keep pace with the falling blocks? Good luck! (Basically it’s Tetris as a widget)
Finally, get more useless and useful widgets from the Konfabulator Widget Gallery.